What's the Story?
by Larbo
Summary: Crossover between DW and a pretty wellknown TV show. If you've never seen the TV show, you probably won't want to bother with the story. On the other hand, you could be pleasantly surprised...
1. Part 1

**What's The Story...?**

It was over. For another few moments, at least, it was over.

He had raced to where she was as quickly as he could. Throwing open the door, he saw her face illuminate to see him, and without another word they rushed into each other's arms, embracing passionately. He held her close, and she held him back just as tightly. Something dropped from her hand and clattered to the floor. It flopped open as it did so, and a cardboard cat in big black boots stood up rather proudly before their feet trampled it to oblivion.

"I love you," he whispered. "Don't forget that. Even for a minute."

"I don't," she replied, tears spilling down her face. Her accent burred deliciously in his ears, just like always. His heart ached to kiss her again, to not waste another precious second of freedom, but he let her say what she needed to say. "I can't...I don't know how much longer I can take this. How much longer any of us can."

"I know," he admitted. "But we'll find a way. We'll stop this. We'll find them."

"I love you," she told him.

"I wish we'd been together when..." he gestured helplessly. "I got here as quick as I cou..."

He got no further. It was beginning again.

She sank to her knees, all the strength leaving her. Helpless sobs wracked her body. "Not again," she said in a weak voice, "please don't make me...not _again_-"

He pulled her to her feet, spun her around to face him. Their eyes met.

"Hang in there," he told her, already feeling himself begin to lose control. "I love you, Miss Hoolie."

"I love you, PC Plum," she replied.

The music swelled into life, and suddenly she was back in her green house, wearing a huge smile. She walked out of her front door, waved to nothingness, and set off jauntily for the nursery, screaming, crying, hollering for help silently while her body puppeted itself through its usual motions independent of her control.

"Hello there," she announced to emptiness as she walked into the nursery. "I know you, don't I? What's your name...?"

**2**

"What do you want to know that for?"

Rose shrugged. "Well it can't be _Doctor_, can it. It's gotta be something." She grinned suddenly, mischievously, in that way she had. "Is it an embarrassing one? I bet it is. I bet it's Gilbert or Charlton or-"

The Doctor looked up from the TARDIS console in what she assumed was meant to be quite a rebuking way. "I _am _in charge of a time and space machine," he reminded her, "I could chuck you out any time I felt like it in...oh, the Triassic period. See how you'd survive on coelacanth and chips."

"Ugh," she stuck out her tongue and then, in that other way she had, spun off in a completely new direction on a whim. "You've got me hungry now though. Can we get something?"

"Home?"

He saw the guilt pass over her face and knew what he had to do. "What am I saying," he added quickly, "I think your Mum's seen quite enough of me squatting in her place after Christmas. We'll pop back in a few days. She could use a break after the whole invasion of Earth, big spaceship over London thing, most likely."

"Well, only if you're sure," she said, relief pouring off her.

"I insist," he insisted. "So, where to milady?"

"Ooh I love this," she said, and it was plain to see she did. More than perhaps anyone else who'd shared his adventures, shared a slice of his odd and nomadic existence, she never tired of the thrill of having an entire universe, an entire timeline to choose from. There had been times, over the last few regenerations, when he'd almost forgotten that pure joy to be found in freedom to roam. It had been that joy, after all, that had separated him from the rest of his people. The wanderer. The meddler.

It had been that joy that had saved them from their fate...

"You should have a big map or something in here," she said.

"A map? Of what?"

"Well, you know...the universe."

"Right..." he nodded dubiously. "Memo to Ordnance Survey: more staff required, Rose Tyler fancies chips, urgent survey needed of cosmos."

"Alright, cheeky," she said, throwing her hands up and then folding them defiantly, staring at him, "why don't _you _choose somewhere for us."

"Glad to," he said, and began working the controls, a process which was half required and half not; as much of the piloting of the TARDIS went on by sheer thought and feeling as by pressing levers, but there was always a certain satisfaction to be gleaned from a good lever press. The Doctor felt for the connection to the Heart of the TARDIS and felt himself slipping into the mental groove required for steering its immense, mysterious energies with time-practised ease.

"Not the future, though," she said. "After the psychotic cat people thing I'm a bit future-d out."

"Uh huh," he said wryly, "you do realise that generally speaking in 2006 terms there's a surprising lack of decent chippies off-Earth."

"Earth it is then," she retorted. "Somewhere quiet. I fancy a bit of a rest. Maybe somewhere in the country."

"Uh huh. But it's _my_ choice, obviously."

"Oh of course. Naturally."

He grinned at her as the materialisation sound wheezed and thrummed around them before fading away. When it had gone, he made a little 'ta-da' body motion and walked to the TARDIS door, throwing it open to reveal a sunny, gloriously green and pleasant landscape. Not a cloud existed in the skies above. A mile or two away, the landscape dove gracefully downward to a magnificent bay, with an azure sea. Seagulls _awked_ in the distance, swooping gently. Sunlight danced on the water.

"Where are we?" Rose said, stepping into the landscape, impressed.

The Doctor was sporting a puzzled frown. "Erm, I'm not entirely sure," he said, "I could have _sworn_ I set the controls for Scotland."

Rose shrugged. "Could be a hot summer."

The Doctor glanced around. "Yeah, could be..." he agreed, doubt fairly dripping off every word.

Set in the centre of the bay landscape below was a small town. Rose pointed. "Town."

"People."

"Cafe."

"Chips," they chorused together.

"Lead on, Macduff," the Doctor said, bowing low.

"Who?"

He sighed. "When we come back, I'm showing you the library."

**3**

It watched them go. They were new. New was...puzzling. New wasn't part of the program. But they were interesting. They could be added to the mix. Of course, they would need to be...acclimatised first. Things would need to be handled carefully in the beginning, but after a while...they'd never want to leave.

No-one wanted to leave.

_No-one._

It simmered with anger, anger at its fate, at the life which had befallen it.

Anger at its own lies.

**4**

They had been walking for over an hour. To Rose's credit and the Doctor's surprise, there had not been so much as one complaint from her direction. In fact, she rather seemed to be enjoying the beatific calm of the place. He wished he could say the same.

"You're quiet," she said. He was surprised, and then rather ashamed at his own surprise. She knew him. She'd known him for long enough now. And the face and the dress sense may have changed (for the better, in his opinion) but the core of the person remained constant always.

"First odd thing," the Doctor said by way of reply. They were only a few minutes out from the town now. With the exception of birds and rustling leaves, and the everso faint lapping of water, it was still remarkably quiet. "No cars."

"It's a small town somewhere in Scotland. They're not exactly renowned for monster truck rallies."

"Mmm," he conceded reluctantly. "All the same, you'd think there would have been _something_."

They rounded a bend in the road. The town was spread out on three, maybe four levels at various heights above the harbour. A few cars (not many, but a few) were indeed pottling along the streets in the distance. He could feel her eyes on him.

"Happy now?"

"I wasn't unhappy before," he said stiffly.

"That's true," she replied. "Just a normal town, Doctor. Sorry to disappoint."

"I just _know_ there's an explanation coming for that one."

"Not everything's a life-or-death adventure. Sometimes a trip for chips is just a trip for chips. Freud. Well, kinda. And for the record – the library is the sixteenth door on the right down the long corridor on the first level."

"Oh, you've been to the small one!" he exclaimed delightedly. "Is that still there? I thought that had been jettisoned!"

She spun to face him. "Hold on a sec. What do you mean, _jett­-" _she started, but got no further as she was interrupted by the sound of a man ostentatiously clearing his throat. They turned, a little startled.

"Ah...good morning to you both," said PC Plum.

"Morning, officer," Rose replied. The Doctor was silent. She nudged him and inclined her head significantly, puzzled at his uncharacteristic hesitancy.

"Yes, hello," the Doctor suddenly jerked into life, stepping forward and pumping the policeman's hand vigorously. "My friend and I are here on holiday. Any good cafes you could recommend?"

"Oh, yes, certainly!" PC Plum beamed brightly. He seemed positively bursting with happiness that he could assist them. Rose couldn't help but smile inwardly. He was a little different to the sort of copper you got used to in London, that was for sure...

"But wh-where are my manners!" he exclaimed suddenly, looking gravely concerned at the offence he must have caused them. "I'm PC Plum. Pleased to meet you both. Welcome to Balamory!"

It was only now that Rose took in the whole ensemble package in front of her. He was riding a bicycle – that's how he had approached them so quietly – but more than that, he was wearing full safety gear. Including helmet with chin strap.

She and the Doctor exchanged glances. She had to look away quickly, because she knew if another glance like that passed between them she'd burst out laughing. And she didn't want to do that to the poor bloke. Besides, despite her protestations to the Doctor, she'd seen the _The Wicker Man_. Better safe than sorry with remote Scottish villagers.

"Rose Tyler," she indicated herself. "And this is Doctor...Taggart."

"Doctor Taggart, at your service," the Doctor echoed, sending a meaningful look her way. She sent an equally easily-translated one right back.

"Ooh, a good Scottish name!" PC Plum bubbled approvingly. "Well, come on, I'll bring ye both to Suzy Sweet's for a big breakfast you'll never forget!"

"Oh, that's really not necessary," Rose said. "If you just point us in the general direction..." and she trailed off, and caught the Doctor's eyes again, because she was sure she would see reflected in them what she herself was thinking – _my God, he is absolutely desperate for us not to go without him..._

"Ach, away," PC Plum said out loud, merrily. "What kind of welcomer would I be to Balamory if I didn't show you around a wee bit at least. Come on!"

And without waiting for any further discussion, he started walking off, wheeling his bicycle beside him. The Doctor started off after him. After a few steps he glanced back at the still-stationary Rose.

"Coming, Sigmund?" he said, and started off after PC Plum.

Muttering dark nothings under her breath, she jogged to catch up.

**5**

"This is terrible! Simply terrible! What are we going to _do_?"

The cut-glass country gent accent rebounded off Rose's ears as she entered the shop / café. She was finding it more and more difficult to deny that something wasn't quite right in the town of Balamory. En route, she could have sworn she saw, in the distance, a woman dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit singing at the top of her voice to thin air. It was either someone enthusiastically rehearsing for _Kill Bill: The Musical_, or…well, there the less-worrying possibilities ended, basically.

Well, this was what she'd signed up for, after all. Somehow though it was easier to accept oddness when you were…say, on a floating space platform 5,000,000,000 years in the future, or in Victorian Wales, or confronted with a Dalek Emperor. Oddness wasn't such of a jolt then. But when you were starving for a good egg and chips and in a sleepy Scottish town, you didn't feel like greeting oddness with a '_fantastic_! and a huge grin.

But you never knew, did you? Maybe people in remote towns got a little odd…just for the hell of it. Maybe they liked to play jokes on visitors, jokes that didn't (and this was vital) involve human sacrifice, and merely involved acting a little odd. Before long the joke would be over and it'd be – ho ho, had you going there, now sit down for a slap-up meal on the house, ye Sassenachs…!

"If I don't get those yoghurt pots, I won't be able to make a special model of Daisy the Cow and the children won't be able to have their special story-time afternoon," wailed the man in the bright pink jumper and the kilt.

Rose sighed.

"What seems to be the problem, Archie?" PC Plum asked urgently.

"Well…" Archie replied, and as Rose and the Doctor watched, he took his hands and drew a large upside-down U shape in the air.

No-one blinked an eyelid.

Rose could _feel _the Doctor's eyes on her. She could _feel _his grin from here.

"It all began this morning in the nursery. Miss Hoolie told me that the children were really looking forward to going to the farm to see the cows. But then Farmer McCracken telephoned to say that he'd been up all night helping one of the cows have a baby, so he was too tired!"

A chorus of heartfelt gasps were heard around the shop, with only two notable exceptions.

"I volunteered to make a model of a cow with my special yoghurt pots. But when I went home to get them, Nobby had cleaned up and there wasn't any to be found! That's why I came here to Penny and Suzy's to get some new ones – but they're sold out! Now the children won't have a model and they'll be even _more _disappointed."

"Oh…" PC Plum frowned, deep in thought. "That _is _a big problem."

During this, Rose had edged closer to the Doctor and, almost without thinking, sought his hand in hers. When she found it, she squeezed. Hard.

An old woman with a kindly face and a red jacket seemed to notice them for the first time. She bustled over to them, smiling. The Doctor had to apply not an insignificant amount of force to stop Rose from turning around and fleeing at her approach.

"Welcome to Pocket and Sweet's," she said, curtseying slightly. "Are ye new in town?"

That seemed to get everyone's attention. For an absurd moment the interior of the shop, with its impossibly garish colours, its complete absence of any brand name goods, its ludicrously large easy-to-read labelling and its total lack of top-shelf magazines (or middle-shelf…or bottom-shelf, for that matter), seemed not unlike a Western saloon with the doors still swinging.

"Yes, we just arrived," the Doctor offered cheerfully.

"Ooh that's wonderful!" she bubbled happily. "I'm Suzy Sweet, this is Penny Pocket, and this is our Archie. He's an inventor you know! Will ye be staying long?"

Rose made an involuntary choking noise in her throat.

"Yes, for a few days I should think," the Doctor went on, ignoring the sudden bout of coughing his companion had developed. He extended a hand and the old woman did likewise. Hers shook. "Doctor Taggart and Rose Tyler. At your service. That goes for all of you."

There was something about the way he said that…

"Ooh, a doctor," cooed the wheelchair-bound girl Suzy had identified as Penny _was this for real _Pocket. Rose noted somewhat wearily that she was clad entirely in blue. Even her nails were painted blue. She was like an escapee from _Why Don't You?_, circa 1987. "We don't have a doctor in Balamory."

"Really?" the Doctor said, too casually to be casual. "Fascinating."

"Yes, but none of this is helping me with my problem," moaned Archie, looking wretched. He sat down heavily on a chair, the very epitome of dejection and defeat. "I suppose I'll just have to tell Miss Hoolie that the children won't have their Daisy the cow story today."

Rose could stay silent no longer. "Can't they just, I dunno, watch cartoons or something?"

There was a pause.

"I know!" PC Plum piped up, as Rose glanced around, patting herself in a reassuring exercise that yes, she existed, "if you can't use yoghurt pots to make a Daisy model, we'll have to use something else!"

Archie fairly leapt out of his chair, delighted. Rose took a long step back, mentally calculating distances and the offensive capabilities of nearby objects. "Of course! But what?"

"Well…" PC Plum smiled conspiratorially, "who in Balamory is good at _designing_ things?"

Everyone pondered this for a moment. The negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles could scarcely have prompted such expressions of intense concentration.

"Spencer!" Archie exclaimed, and promptly charged out of the door.

It took Rose a good five seconds to lower her hands.

"Well…" the Doctor said, in the absence of anyone else volunteering to speak, "now that that's sorted, can Rose and I trouble you for a bite to eat?"

"I'm not hungry," Rose said instantly.

"Yes you are, Rose."

"Wanna bet?"

He shot her a look, leaned in close so he could whisper. "They need help."

"Nah? You think?"

But it was no use. This was who they were. He had seen enough to concern him, to suggest that people needed help, and he wouldn't leave before trying his utmost to find out what was going on here and if necessary, tear the place asunder.

It was why she-

"Here you go," Suzy called. "Come on through to the café!"

Five minutes later, after the Doctor's sonic screwdriver had given it the once over, Rose was tucking into the biggest plate of fried goodness she'd ever seen (despite the fact she saw no evidence of a kitchen), and feeling somewhat more well-disposed toward the idea of staying awhile in Balamory.

**6**

It watched them eat. How had they gotten here? It had made this place outside the world.

Except…

Yes. It looked, re-set parameters, used old settings. And there it stood.

It called for it to be brought. Soon its owner would have no need of it anyway.

**7**

In a house off Balamory Main Street, a little old man who at present was colouring in a picture of a horsey with a big brown crayon stopped what he was doing. He couldn't make the big brown lines stay within the horsey. It was a pretty horsey, and he was ruining it with his big brown lines. He had always been able to do it before, but today his arthritis was playing up and making his big old stupid hands shake, and the horsey was all smudged now.

The children would see.

The children would be _so_ disappointed.

Tears stung his eyes as he ran the bath. Made his vision blur as he found the extension cord. They dried briefly, but only because the hairdryer was blowing on his face.

He switched it off, and dropped it into the water where he lay.

On the kitchen table downstairs, someone had scrawled the word SRRY in big brown crayon over a crude drawing of a horse.

**8**

"Do you remember," Rose said thoughtfully, as they ascended the hill that comprised Balamory, when the Daleks had captured me and they were all set to exterminate me?"

The Doctor made a show of _hmmm_'ing for a few seconds. "Vaguely," he replied.

"If you offered me a choice between that, and when that guy with the kilt charged at us, I'd pick the Daleks every time."

He laughed. "Your face! I thought you were going to swoon into my arms."

She gave him a dubious look. "Swoon?"

"Er, well…"

"Collapse, more like. So what's going on here? Is everyone completely totally mad or what?"

"I'm not sure yet," the Doctor replied. "The sonic screwdriver's not picking up anything out of the ordinary, which could mean either everyone _is _mad or that there's something going on that's too advanced to register."

This hill was hard going, but she found that she wasn't even begrudging the trudging. She did pause for a moment, but only to turn and silently admire the view. He stopped alongside her. Rose had to admit that, despite a population of loonies, Balamory really was one of the prettiest places she'd ever been to. For a few seconds they just drank in the casual beauty of the landscape painted before them, effortless perfection, like something taken from a child's storybook.

Something in her head went _ding._ She frowned, but it was gone as quickly as it had arrived.

"You must have some theories," she accused him, as they began to ascend the steeply rising streets once again, "I know you."

"Oh you do, do you? Should I brace myself for another little psychoanalysis session?"

"What's the matter? I get close?" she grinned.

_Too close_.

"Not a bit of it," he lied, and then went on to detail the various spatial vortexes or alien races that could be behind the Balamory anomaly, all the while his mind on very different matters. Was she right? He knew better than anyone that the Heart of the TARDIS was linked to his mind, partially piloted by his mind. How much of his mind? The conscious, or the subconscious? Did he crave danger? Was the TARDIS sending him on these adventures because it was responding to that craving?

Had the companions who died on those adventures died because of it?

A large yellow mini-bus went past at what seemed like 200mph, but was probably a normal enough speed – it seemed supersonic only because it had been the only vehicle that had actually driven past them since they arrived.

"Wonder where it's going in such a rush," Rose observed.

"Same place everyone goes in this town," the Doctor replied. "Same place we're going. The nursery."

**9**

"…and I think everyone should say a great big _thank you _to Archie and Spencer for designing such a fantastic model of Daisy the Cow – and thanks to Edie McCredie for bringing it here in her bus, just in time for story time!"

The children mumbled their _thank you_s in the general direction of the adults concerned. Archie blushed enormously and went back to operating Daisy's arms and legs, making her 'dance' erratically for the children's amusement.

Not that they were amused.

Miss Hoolie sighed contentedly and walked over to her special chair. "So," she said with a smile, addressing thin air, "what was the story in Balamory today? Well…"

The door to the nursery opened. "Hello?" the Doctor called, Rose making sure she was as hidden as possible behind him. She caught sight of a young woman clad in green with what could only be described as an _unfortunate_ hairstyle making an upside down U shape in mid-air.

"It's the Satanic sign!" Rose hissed.

"Ssh," the Doctor replied. They walked into the main floor area of the nursery, where around eight children stood or sat. "Archie, old chap!" he said brightly. "How's it hanging?"

Rose nudged him in the ribs, shocked. "The _puppet_," the Doctor clarified.

Archie looked up from his Daisy puppetry briefly. "Oh, er, hello again," he said, sounding absurdly guilty. "Just helping the children out with story time. Won't be a mo."

Rose glanced around at the children. They weren't paying the least bit of attention to Archie's frantic caperings. There were two other adults nearby – her mind instantly labelled them Blue Lady and Orange Man. It was like the whole town was in the grip of an overly complicated Traffic Light Disco. Neither had noticed the newcomers – like Archie, they were trying their best to entertain the children in a frantic, disconcertingly _desperate _way.

"Right bunch of livewires, this lot," she commented.

The Doctor waved a hand in front of a small boy's face. His expression remained vacant. He continued trying to put a square peg in a round hole. He squatted down on his hands and knees. "Hello there, little man," he said cheerfully, "I'm the Doctor. What's your name?"

Slowly, gradually, the little boy's eyes raised from his peg-hole toy to meet the Doctor's gaze. As this happened, Archie and the other two adults stopped what they were doing and abruptly seemed extremely concerned.

On her special chair, Miss Hoolie saw. Her eyes widened in alarm. She had to finish. She had to finish quickly, before-

"Oh don't bother Afga while he's playing!" Archie said, voice cheerful and hollow in equal measure.

Rose began to get a strong sense of foreboding. She dropped her hand on the Doctor's shoulder.

"Maybe you should-" she began, but it was too late, and several things happened very quickly.

Afga's eyes met the Doctor's.

The Doctor began to shriek.

The other children began to look up from what they were doing.

"…I'll see you next time. Goodbye!" Miss Hoolie cried out, and vanished.

The children vanished a half-second later. The Doctor's shriek tailed off.

Rose finally realised she could move. "Doctor!" she said, and dived forward to gather him up before he toppled backward. She had never heard him make a sound like that – never heard _anyone _make a sound like that. It had frozen her to the core. His eyes were shut, tightly shut.

She could smell _burning_.

The other adults were upon them. Rose dragged the Doctor back , recoiling. "Get away from us!" she said fiercely, sick of this crazy place, equal parts angry and terrified at what had happened to the Doctor.

Blue Lady simply pushed her aside, cupping the Doctor's head in her hands and examining him closely. "He's bad," she said simply. "Caught it full on, looks like."

"Poor chap," Archie said softly.

"Poor? Lucky more like – if Kerrie hadn't finished the episode as quickly as she did, he'd have a hole through the back of his head," snorted Orange Man. He had a strong American accent.

"Help me get him to bus. He shouldn't be here. Neither should you," and she was talking to Rose now, not unkindly but firmly nonetheless, "not if you don't know the rules."

Rose examined their faces. There was none of the vacancy of expression there had been until recently, none of the waxen quality. They looked, despite their ridiculous outfits, like real people. "What the _hell_ is going on?" she demanded.

Archie checked the huge, happy-face clock. "We've got eighteen minutes."

"Spencer, Archie, get him in the bus."

They moved with purpose and speed. Rose felt blood thundering in her ears. This was all becoming a little too much to deal with.

"I'm Edie," said Blue Lady, keeping that reassuring smile fixed on Rose, "c'mon, let's get the hell out of here, and I'll explain as much as I can on the way."

"Where did all the kids go?" Rose asked, weakly. She watched that smile disappear entirely.

"Back to Hell," Edie replied.


	2. Part 2

**10**

Balamory had gone postal.

Cradling the unconscious Doctor in her arms, Rose watched from the rear passenger seats in the yellow bus as the population of an entire town went crazy in a way she'd never seen. People ran out from their houses, most of them dressed in one uniform colour, and began tearing off their clothes and coverings. She saw two women in nothing but their underwear running full tilt down the main street.

That was just for starters.

From somewhere – God knew where – alcohol had been produced, and wherever she looked people were drinking as much as they could, as fast as they could. Packets of cigarettes were being distributed and lighters were in huge demand. Crowds of smokers huddled together taking huge draws, their faces rapt in the sort of ecstasy you usually only associated with-

"Oh my _God_!"

Spencer smiled as Rose looked away from the scene unfolding. "Yeah…probably best you don't see that," he said. "It can take some getting used to."

"But they were-"

"Yeah."

"All _four _of them? In _public_?"

"Not pretty, is it?" Spencer sympathised, before his gaze lingered on her a little longer. "If only there were more attractive sights to look at…"

"What _is _this place?" Rose said, feeling homesick for home and not even stopping to wonder at the wonder of that feeling. "You're all crazy – one minute you're obsessing about yoghurt pots-"

"Please," Archie shivered in disgust, "don't even _say _those words. Got my trousers, Edie?"

"Under your seat as always, Arch," Edie called back, gunning the bus down the road. She had to swerve to avoid some revellers jumping into the middle of the street. Someone had produced a boombox sound system. Rose looked out in disbelief at the sight of what looked like an impromptu rave unfolding on the streets of Balamory.

"You might want to look away for a sec," Archie said.

"Why would I _oh my God_!"

"I did warn you," Archie shrugged, buttoning his trousers. He hefted his kilt and curled his lip in disgust. A moment later it was spiralling out the window and landing in the road. Had they time, Archie would have requested the bus reverse to back up over it.

"How we doing?" Edie asked.

"Eleven minutes," Spencer replied. "There they are."

Rose strained to see who they were discussing. She saw soon enough. The bus screeched to a halt alongside them. They waited for ten or fifteen discreet seconds, to no avail. Finally, Edie opened the passenger side doors.

"Alright, you two!" she called. "Time! C'mon!"

Reluctantly, Miss Hoolie and PC Plum separated from each other…briefly, anyway.

Edie rolled her eyes. "Jesus Christ, don't make me get a bucket of cold water!"

"Aw," Spencer complained, "I was kinda enjoying it."

"Pervert," Edie retorted.

The lovers got on the bus, hand-in-hand. Miss Hoolie was rearranging herself in places Rose would have until recently sworn blind – and wagered good money – were unknown to the touch of man.

"So who _are_ you two?" PC Plum asked her. "How did you get here?"

Rose felt the words stick in her throat. On the one hand – vanishing demon children, entire town suffering from extreme bipolar disorder – she suspected that coming clean about their status as time-travellers might not be dismissed as nonsense. On the other, she was less than convinced of the sanity of anyone here, let alone whether they could be trusted with the truth.

But the Doctor was hurt. He needed her help, and that meant she needed theirs.

On _her _terms.

"I'll tell you," she nodded, "but you have to help him first."

A significant look was shared between everyone on the bus. Rose interpreted that look. She began to tremble a little bit. It wasn't a particularly difficult look to decipher.

Miss Hoolie sat down beside her. "He's gone," she said simply.

"Gone? What are you talking about? He's breathing! I can see him breathing! Here – feel him breathing –" and she made to grab Miss Hoolie's hand and guide it to the Doctor's chest, but when their hands touched Miss Hoolie's grip was amazingly strong, and Rose couldn't budge her.

"I didn't say he was dead, lass," she said sadly. "He's not dead. But he's gone. When they look at you like that, when the scream comes from within you…you never come back. You close your eyes and you never, ever open them again."

"No," Rose breathed, hugging the Doctor closer to her. "No, you don't know him. He's not like us. He's survived…" she hesitated; how to explain what had happened between them when Rose Tyler, albeit briefly, had straddled the cosmos, imbued with the power of Time itself?

"He'll come back," she finished weakly.

"Eight minutes," Spencer said meaningfully.

"We don't have time for this!" PC Plum said impatiently. "We're all sorry about your friend, but there are 400 people in this town and you're the only hope we have."

"Me?" Rose queried, hugging the Doctor still, wishing with everything she had that he would just wake up, open his eyes and make everything a little less confusing, tear through the strangeness of it all with one of his smiles, as he always did.

_Where are you? _she thought desperately, looking down at his face, frozen in a grimace of pain still. _Why don't you come back to me? What's happened to you?_

He made no reply.

**11**

See through my eyes, Doctor.

See through me.

**12**

The Doctor watched as the battle raged. He stood on the command deck, surrounded by his troops, surrounded by his fleet, and he knew that before the day was done, his homeworld would be little more than a smoking, radioactive ruin.

"Close that flank!" he barked at his tactical officer. "Tell the seventh to accelerate and bring the fifth broadside, to shield them – they need time to bring shields bac-"

The _Aevis _shuddered then, a deep booming spasm coming from deep within. He knew they had taken a hit, perhaps two, in a system that couldn't take the last five.

"Weapons systems won't respond!" another crew member told him.

"Then target the nearest mothership," the Doctor growled, "and accelerate to whatever speed we can muster."

A heartbreakingly pathetic _thrummm _began and died choking within moments. "Propulsion is gone."

On the viewscreen, two of the huge craft paused in their task of systematically exterminating his entire race. He watched their huge hulking masses turn in the blackness of the void, illuminated sharply by the deep crimson of his homeworld – the colour caused by a planet-spanning firestorm asphyxiating all that once lived on its surface.

"Abandon ship," he whispered, as the Dalek ships fired, again and again and again.

**13**

How had he survived?

He hadn't hurried to the escape pods, expecting at any moment the bulkheads around him to vanish into flaming-hot plasma, anticipating that awful pull as he was sucked into the vacuum of space, there to die of exploding lungs, silently screaming. But no.

He hadn't plotted any clever course around the Dalek fleet peppering his homeworld's solar system. His pod meandered at sublight speeds around the huge ships, and he waited for the streaks of death erupting around him to track his course, to impact his tiny little sphere of life and break it open.

But no.

Drifting to the edge of his solar system, he was witness as the Dalek ships finished their work. His homeworld annihilated, they turned their attention to the offworld colonies, pounding them from space until they buckled, imploded, turned to ash.

This work done, they vanished into the realms of the superluminal, leaving behind the remnants of a solar system, the ruin of an entire civilisation, of seven billion lives.

He drifted, alone.

The pod sought out the most suitable refuge inhabitable world automatically. The journey took four years. He was kept alive. Automatically. For that time – the pod had no transmitter of any power – he could only receive snatches of reports of the galaxy outside.

Death was everywhere.

The Time War was raging through the cosmos.

And then one day, he landed in heaven.

**14**

"Morning Suzy."

"Och hello Josie," Suzie McCormack grinned down as she rearranged the magazines on display. This done to her satisfaction, she hopped nimbly down behind the counter and greeted the young black girl properly. "What can I do for ye?"

Josie glanced furtively around. It was for show, obviously – the shop was as deserted as ever at 10am. "I've run out," she said, trying to keep a smile from her face and not quite succeeding.

"_Miss _Young," Suzie said, apparently appalled beyond measure, before her poker face collapsed into a fond grin. "Ever thought of buying in bulk?" she teased the younger girl, as she rummaged underneath the counter for two small packets.

"Come on. He's only staying the weekend."

"And your point would be?"

Josie laughed. "You give village shopkeepers a bad name, Suzy."

Money was exchanging hands when the door opened and he entered. Both women noticed the chill in the air, but both put it down to the crisp March air escaping indoors as the door swung open and closed.

"So how's your Jim?" Josie asked, slipping her purchases into her pocket.

"You know our Jim," Suzy replied, in such a fond-yet-I-could-strangle-him way that it made Josie giggle again. "If he's not down fishing he's off in the hills pretending to ramble – thinks I don't know about that little shack he and Albert have a few miles down Tobh Road. "

"Shack?"

Suzy waggled her eyebrows meaningfully. "Still."

Josie looked blank. Suzy clucked in frustration. "Ach you're such a city lass, Josie. Distillery? For moonshine? Poteen? Home brew?"

"No!" Josie said, delighted.

"You don't know the h-"

"Excuse me," said the Doctor.

Suzy looked down from the conversation. She smiled politely. "Och, hello. Can I help you?"

"I...hope so," the Doctor replied. "Where is the local defence battalion located? I wish to offer my services."

Silence reigned in the shop for a few long moments. Long enough, in fact, for young Kerrie Hoolie and her two boys to tumble in the front door. Suzy nodded a brief hello and then subtly indicated the newcomer with an inclination of her head. Kerrie nodded and tried to reign the boys in, content to wait her turn until Suzy was finished.

"Er..." she began, unable to keep a big smile off her face, "I don't think the Army is looking for people just yet. They have a base on the mainland, not far from the ferry terminal."

"Excellent," the Doctor replied eagerly. "I will go there now."

Josie and Suzy exchanged glances. She couldn't help feeling concerned. He exuded a powerful air of sadness, of loss, that she wasn't even consciously aware of, but it affected her nonetheless, for she was a kind-hearted sort by nature.

"There's no war on, you know," she said, leaning down on the counter to better address the Doctor. "I think we should probably try and get hold of your M-"

But little Matty Hoolie had had enough by this stage. He threw himself headfirst into the quite modest display of toys on show in the shop. There was an almighty clatter as footballs and tennis rackets and water pistols tumbled from their holding racks.

"_Matty_!"

"Was n'accident Mam! N'accident! Didnae mean it Mam I swear Mam!"

"You little rascal..." Kerrie said ruefully.

"Ach never mind him," Suzy grinned at the four-yea r-old, who gave her a sticky smile back. Josie ruffled his little brother Tyler's hair. Tyler, only two and shaped like a brunette football with two enormous front teeth, squawked indignantly. Josie and Kerrie squatted down to pick up the fallen toys.

"Thanks Josie," Kerrie said gratefully, giving Matty a warning look to remain fixed to the spot. "Eight children at the nursery five hours a day five days a week, no problem. These two to the shops – living nightmare."

"What will their Daddy say!" Josie said loudly. She saw the brief look of concern on Matty's face. "You'll have to be arrested for vandalism!"

"Aye, I might just tell PC Daddy to do just that!"

"Sorry Mam don't tell Daddy Mam he'll shout Mam!!" Matty said, and then grinned hugely. "Love you _so_ much Mam," he added, to the laughter of Josie and Suzy.

"Manipulative little so-and-so," Kerrie said, but she couldn't maintain her strictness in the face of everyone else's amusement.

Well...almost everyone.

The Doctor looked at the two children. They became aware of his stare. Matty stared back in that unconcerned way four-year-olds have. "Hey, what's your name?" he asked cheerily, as beside him, Tyler picked his nose with the kind of exploratory zest that would have made Edmund Hillary green with envy.

"These...are yours?" the Doctor asked Kerrie.

No-one heard him.

He fell silent then. In fact, he uttered not another word in the shop, merely stood back and watched the children as they bustled around, as they traded sly punches with each other, as the little one cried loudly until its…his mind tasted the unfamiliar word…its _mother_ admonished the bigger one (at which point the little one, belying his supposed lack of sophistication, grinned in a _most_ satisfied way), as they both harangued their mother for small pieces of wrapped foodstuffs until their mother raised her voice again, at which point the old female behind the counter supplied the foodstuffs and refused to accept a trade from the mother for them, for which she was thanked.

They left. He slipped out to follow them, causing Suzy some concern. When her attention was distracted avoiding ground-based vehicles which also utilised some of the common living space, he allowed himself to fade into the background. It was a simple survival trait of his race, one that had ensured their ascent to the top of the food chain on Therka, one that had been utterly useless against the Daleks.

And for a week, he watched.

Since the Time War impacted his planet, many years before his birth, children on Therka had been bred carefully and in a controlled fashion. Their early growth was accelerated, supplemented with hormones, genetic therapy. They suckled for only four days at the machines designed to mimic the mothers. After that, they were assessed based on the needs of the war effort and placed into education programs identified as beneficial. Education involved direct electrochemical interfacing with the neurons in the cerebral cortex. It was incredibly efficient.

Four days after birth infant Therkans entered the educational program. Three days later, fed throughout on more of the refined growth accelerators, an seven-day-old Therkan – already at 80 of adult brain capacity, and with fully developed co-ordination – could be relied upon to pilot a cruiser with adequate training, could perform surgery or make tactical analyses of battlefield losses and gains.

Seven days.

In seven days, Kerrie Hoolie's children learned to put toast in the DVD player.

That was it.

That was all.

It wasn't _fair_. It wasn't _right_. These people lived in a heaven he had never come close to witnessing. And how he longed to experience it. How he longed to watch television and refuse to put on pyjamas and scream if he didn't get chocolate and then use the mystical factor known only as _cuteness _to get his own way and not be resented for it.

His homeworld was a charred ruin, his people dead and gone. But here...perhaps here he could learn how to fill the void within him. How to feel alive again – to feel _something _again.

He would be a child.

Everything had to be perfect. Everything had to be right.

And when he was done, it would be perfect. It would be a paradise for children. A town built for them, a town without malice or spite or violence or sex, a town with only kindness, goodness, fun, and above all...innocence.

And no-one would _ever_ want to leave. Because that might make the children sad.

And no-one would _ever_ disappoint these children.

**15**

"We don't have time for this!" PC Plum said impatiently. "We're all sorry about your friend, but there are 400 people in this town and you're the only hope we have."

"Me?" Rose queried.

The Doctor's eyes snapped open. "No, not just you," he said. "I thought I could _ooof_-" and whatever his next words would have been, they were muffled for the massive hug she enveloped him in.

"I _knew _you'd be alright!" she said when she had released him.

His smile died a little as he sat up and stretched a little. "I wasn't so sure myself for a while," he admitted, rubbing his eyes and blinking. They itched and stung like someone had just rubbed his corneas with sandpaper, but that horrific burning sensation he'd experienced had receded.

Everyone else was astonished.

"Just what _are_ you?" PC Plum demanded, a mite suspiciously. "No-one has _ever _recovered from the Look."

The Doctor shrugged semi-apologetically and tapped his head. "I'm a little more receptive to telepathic communication that strong. And talk about stron-"

"Six minutes," said Spencer.

"Would you give over with the minutes!" Rose snapped at him. "You're like a James Bond countdown henchman with that – it's _really _getting on my nerves!"

Spencer demonstrated what he thought of that.

"Charming," Rose retorted. "Same to you."

"I hate to interrupt," Edie called from the driver's seat, "but if we have a destination of, say, whatever boat or plane got you two here, shouldn't we be barrelling for it now, before it's back to square one?"

"Well done that bus driver!" cried the Doctor. "The road south out of here Madam, and step on it!"

The bus shot forward on command, leaving behind the huge open-air orgy party that was Balamory main street. Rose noticed something so obvious about the scene they were speeding away from that she wondered how she hadn't noticed it before...

"Where are all the kids?" she said aloud.

PC Plum's hand dropped to Miss Hoolie's shoulder and squeezed. Rose saw this. So did the Doctor. He leaned forward and offered his hand. She looked to him.

"You know, don't you," she said. "You know what's going on here."

"He showed me," the Doctor replied.

"Where are they?" PC Plum asked urgently, desperately.

The Doctor shrugged. "I don't know."

PC Plum lunged out of his seat, grabbing the Doctor by the lapels and propelling him forcefully into the back doors of the bus, even as they continued to hurtle out of town.

"_You DO know!_" he hissed accusingly at the Doctor, agonised tears beginning to form in his eyes. "_Tell me where my sons are!_"

"Leave him alone!" Rose shouted over the roar of the engine, standing up and almost losing her balance as they rounded a bend.

"This isn't helping anyone, Plummers!" Archie cried, stepping forward.

"Don't _Plummers _me you English pansy!" the policeman retorted, keeping his grip on the Doctor and not moving his eyes from the Doctor's face for even a second.

Rose had seen enough of the Doctor in action to know that he could have escaped Plum's grip any time he saw fit. But he simply stared back at the broken man, nothing but deep and genuine sympathy in his eyes.

"I am not your enemy," he said softly. "You called my friend here your best hope. You were right about that, but you were wrong about who. Because believe me, I will not stop until I return this town to normal and until your children are back with you. Now, you can either trust me on that, or you can toss me out this bus and go back to making Memory Trees and Wish Buckets in – Spencer?"

"Three minutes," said Spencer obligingly, his eyes wide as saucers.

"-three minutes time. Up to you."

"Let him go Plummy," Edie called back. "Or so help me it won't be _him _getting tossed off my bus."

The Doctor was released. No verbal apologies were given, but the Doctor read what he needed in Plum's eyes, and accepted it with the merest of nods.

"Veer into the field on your left about a hundred yards down this road," the Doctor called, making his way up the central passage of the bus (and giving Rose a reassuring hand squeeze _en route_) "and you'll find something a lot better than a plane or a boat for getting off this island."

Edie did as she was told. The bus crashed through a hedge at full pelt, sending everyone reeling for a moment, but it held together and they were driving through the field that the TARDIS had first materialised within.

"Ah," the Doctor said, a mite less cheerfully.

The TARDIS was gone.

"One minute," Spencer said.

"Not now," the Doctor snapped back.

"Well?" Plum said. "Where is it?"

"He's taken it," the Doctor said grimly.

"Er, what _is _it?" Archie asked.

"Time machine," Rose told him.

"Ah," Archie appeared to consider this. "Fair enough."

The bus shuddered to a halt. Edie opened the doors and the Doctor was out in a flash. The passengers were out a moment after him. He was fumbling in his pockets for the sonic screwdriver, waving it in the air. It flashed purposefully in one direction.

"Strong signal," he said in relief. "That way."

"We haven't time!" Edie said desperately.

"What's going to happen?" Rose fairly screamed in frustration.

"We're all about to go back to Never Never Land," Spencer said, defeated. He glanced over at her thoughtfully. "Don't s'pose you'd-"

"No!"

It was Kerrie's turn to grab the Doctor. "You have to help us. We won't be ourselves for another God knows how long. And it'll know. It knows you're here now, doesn't it?"

Rose didn't like the sound of that. The Doctor only nodded. "Yes."

"Don't leave us," she implored him, beginning to sob. "Please. Help us. Find my boys..._please_-"

And the music swelled into life, and suddenly she was back in her green house, wearing a huge smile. She walked out of her front door, waved to nothingness, and set off jauntily for the nursery, screaming, crying, hollering for help silently while her body puppeted itself through its usual motions independent of her control.

"Hello there," she announced to emptiness as she walked into the nursery. "I know you, don't I? What's your name...?"

**16**

They were alone in the field. He interpreted her look as he swung the sonic screwdriver and got a better fix on the signal.

"Come on," he said, setting off, "I'll explain on the way."

_How much of my life is spent trotting after him while he explains what's going on?_ Rose wondered to herself as she jogged to catch up. _Will this be what it's like? Me hurrying to catch up to him when I'm 35, 45, saying 'what is it Doctor?' 'what's happening Doctor?' 'what do we do, Doctor?' endlessly?_

_Am I a companion, or a sidekick? Is there any difference?_

The Doctor had stopped walking. Rose realised this a step too late. He was looking at her in a way that made it difficult to look back, and suddenly something he'd said about being more receptive to telepathic communication occurred to her…

"Thank you," he said.

"For what?"

"Being worried about me. Believing in me," and he grinned, "and putting up with me."

"Well," she sniffed regally, "I try, you know."

They followed the signal through the fields, and as they walked he explained to her what was happening, what it was, and what they needed to do.

She didn't mind one bit.

"This town – and a few square miles of the surrounding countryside – all exists outside of the world. He took the real world and pinched it together, like folds of skin, and Balamory fell down between. Completely inaccessible by normal means."

"Who? Who did this?"

**17**

I did this.

I am being brought to the nursery where they will amuse me. I sit beside the driver, and I sit behind the driver, at the window seat, in the seat by the aisle. When we arrive, the brightly-coloured cheerful driver opens the door and I run to the nursery, and I run to the nursery, and I run to the nursery. All of me runs there. As I enter, the lady calls out my names and welcomes me to a place where I will be warm and welcome, well-fed and loved.

I _must_ be loved.

At the beginning, I tried to be one child. But one was insufficient. I had too much pain, too much loneliness.

And when I was only one child, there were times when _other _children were getting attention. _Other _children who _weren't me_ were dancing, painting, blobbing, building, making their favourite thing.

So I screamed and I cried and I made them all go away.

And I became them all.

These two who approach my special place now, my very _home_, they would seek to bring about an end to what I have done here. They imagine they can do this, to me? I will show them what it means to anger me. I am all children. I will rage at them and they will know my fury.

It's _mine. _It's mine and I _want it!_

**18**

"Ah," the Doctor said.

"I'm starting to dread you saying that."

"I don't understand…" the Doctor waved his sonic screwdriver around in the air like a frustrated conductor. They were standing in the middle of a large field. Rose was beginning to dislike the countryside. I mean, was this _it_? Loads of grass, a few hedges? It looked nice at first, sure, but after a while the novelty began to wear off…

A cow was meandering over. It regarded them, chewing industriously.

"Go away," Rose told it.

"Moo," the cow replied.

Rose frowned. Something was amiss, but she couldn't…

"Do cows go moo?" she asked the Doctor, feeling more than faintly ridiculous.

"Course not," the Doctor replied, without even turning his head. "But children are told they do."

"Moo," the cow agreed. It sounded _odd_.

The Doctor cursed luxuriously in an alien language. "It should _be _here!" he exclaimed. "TARDIS is loud and clear and right here in this field, and I'm not reading any phase shifting, any tesseract activity. It doesn't make sense."

"Could it be…outside, like we're outside the world?"

The Doctor looked at her, astonished. "I _knew_ there was a reason I kept you around," he said.

"Apart from the obvious?"

"And that would be?" he replied, causing her to stick out her tongue out by way of answer. "The cycle…" the Doctor continued, musing aloud, "every time it begins again, his consciousness is distributed amongst the children back in the town. When it ends…it recuperates here before it has the energy to begin again."

"So the TARDIS is back in town?"

"No, but more answers might be," the Doctor said. "Up for another ramble, Rose Tyler?"

"Do we _have_ to go back there?" Rose groaned.

"Oh come on," the Doctor assured her, "they'll be in the middle of another exciting episode of _Balamory_. What could happen?"

**19**

"Sounds like we've a visitor. I wonder who it could be? I'll just go and see," Miss Hoolie announced to no-one in particular, and walked to the door of the nursery.

"Archie! PC Plum! Spencer! Penny! Josie! Suzy! Edie!" she said, as each person filed into the nursery. "Gracious me! What has ye all over this fine morning? I'm not sure I have enough cups of tea for all of you!"

"Ach never mind that Miss Hoolie, we don't mind," Edie assured her.

"We don't?" PC Plum said, crestfallen.

"No Plummy, we don't," Edie echoed sternly.

"We're all here because Penny had a jolly exciting idea for an extra special adventure today!" Archie announced grandly.

Penny, sitting with a large wrapped blanket in her lap, blushed modestly. "Wellll…" she said modestly, "it was me _and _Archie who came up with it really."

"Oh! Sounds exciting!" Miss Hoolie exclaimed. "Tell me all about it!"

"I thought we could all play…" and Penny winked conspiratorially at the others, "…tag!"

Miss Hoolie blinked. "Tag?" she said doubtfully. "Is that all?"

"Oh it's not just _any _old game of Tag, Miss Hoolie," Suzy piped up.

"No way!" Spencer agreed.

"No, this is the biggest game of tag _ever_!" Josie whooped with excitement. "We're going to play across the whole island!"

"The whole island!" Miss Hoolie repeated, dumbstruck. "But that'll take all day!"

"It'll be good exercise for us all," PC Plum stated firmly. "Your assistants can look after the children, just for today. What d'you say, Miss Hoolie?"

There was a chorus of _Come on, Miss Hoolie _from all assembled. Miss Hoolie cast an agonised look at the children playing peacefully in the nursery. Finally, she nodded. "All right."

Another chorus of _good for you, Miss Hoolie _resounded.

"So, who's going to be 'it' first?" she asked.

"Oh, none of us!" Penny laughed. "There are two people gonna be 'it' and they've already started hiding across the island! And the fun bit is – they don't even _know _they're 'it', so when we see them we've gotta tag 'em as soon as we can!"

She unwrapped the blanket on her lap. "And we tag them," she continued, "with these."

Miss Hoolie lifted the assault rifle.

"Well then, what are we waiting for?" she said cheerfully, slipping off the safety and loading a clip in one smooth, expert motion. "Let's play!"


	3. Part 3

**20**

There was something vaguely familiar about this, Rose thought to herself, as they trudged once again toward Balamory town. Except this time she wasn't expecting to find something exotic and rare, like say a sleepy Scottish town. This time she knew she was in for a run-of-the-mill town under alien mind control.

Was he an oddness magnet? She glanced across at him as he adjusted controls on his sonic screwdriver, his face a mask of concentration, but those eyes as calm as ever. There he was. Her…what? Her best friend? Her thousand-year-old-plus, enigmatic time-travelling extra-terrestrial best friend.

What did she know about him?

Did it matter?

He had come along, saved her life, plucked her from council estates and deposited her on alien shores bare moments later (or so it seemed). He had taken her from her family, her boyfriend, her whole world. All she knew about him, all she knew for sure, was that he radiated goodness in a way totally unlike anyone else she'd ever met. An alien with more humanity than any human. And that went a long way toward overlooking the mysteries and the questions avoided.

"Do I have something on my hair?" the Doctor asked easily, without looking up from his machinations with the screwdriver.

She snapped out of it. "Just wondering what you were doing."

"Recalibrating."

"Can you get Radio 1 on it?"

He sighed. "I can open security doors. Defraud ATMs. Detect emissions in any spectrum you'd care to name. Create force-fields. Given the proper conditions, I can affect the fabric of space and time itself."

"But can you-"

"No!" he muttered, annoyed at the admission. "It only gets AM," he muttered.

"FM model was extra?" she continued, knowing full well she was teasing him mercilessly. If there was one thing the Doctor was fiercely protective, it was his technology. If she ever wanted them to break up, she'd probably just have to look at the TARDIS and say _did I just use the term 'break up'? Oh my God-_

"Ah! Our chariot awaits!" the Doctor grinned. "Look!"

She looked, grateful for the distraction. Sure enough, winding its way toward them down the final hill before Balamory bay, was a bright yellow bus that was becoming a very familiar sight.

"Over here!" the Doctor waved. "Come get us!"

**21**

Spencer huffed and puffed as best he could, but it was no use – his big tricycle, complete with side-baskets for his art materials and his instruments, was just too heavy for him to keep up with the Daisy Bus. He watched it crest the hill ahead of him.

"Wait up guys!" he called, pumping the pedals faster. Boy, was this going to be good! He sure hoped he'd be the one to tag them first!

From over the hill came the sound of assault rifles firing. "Awww!" Spencer said aloud, disappointed. He got to the top of the hill and saw everyone else spilling out of the Daisy Bus in all directions. He heard the faint voice of Penny directing everyone to split up. Of the Doctor and Rose, nothing was to be found. They must be hiding still! Spencer smiled. Penny thought up the _best_ games!

His trike accelerated down the hill. He cupped his hand to his mouth as he called "Wait up, gu-"

That's when he was tackled from the side.

"Get him!" the Doctor cried, holding his legs as they came to rest in a jumble of limbs.

"Hey, you guys! That was kinda rough!" Spencer said, rubbing his head. He felt behind his back for the AK-47 slung there. They must have been hiding in the hedge running alongside the road!

"Hey, good trick!" he said admiringly. "Boy, this is gonna be – "

"Oh shut _up_," Rose said, and punched him in the head. Hard.

Spencer did just that. His head lolled to the side. Rose rubbed her hand, muttering little _ow_ noises to herself. The Doctor scrambled to his feet and grabbed her by the arm, propelling her unceremoniously to the tricycle as, with two expertly placed and powerful kicks, he dispensed with the side-baskets, leaving just the trike itself.

Below them, there was an upper-class twang to the "There they are! Jolly good!" shout that went up. Seconds later, bullets began peppering the roadside where they stood.

"Get on!" the Doctor hollered, jumping onto the trike. Rose didn't have to be told twice – hell, she'd been halfway there before being told _once_ – and within seconds, they were racing away, the Doctor's legs pumping powerfully. They crested the hill and were flying down the other side in seconds.

Behind them, she heard the unmistakable _putter-putter-voom _of the Daisy bus' engines starting up.

"They're trying to shoot us!"

"Yes, I did notice!" the Doctor shouted back. They were eating up ground at an incredible rate. Whether they were eating it up faster than a bus could drive, though...

"_Why_ are they trying to shoot us?!"

"It's not them! They don't know what they're doing!"

"Well, that is _such_ a comfort, innit!"

They were almost at Balamory town proper now. Rose risked a glance behind them.

"Doctor...!!!"

The Daisy Bus had crested the hill and was closing the gap between them with sickening speed. Rose couldn't take her eyes off it. It was the most unlikely harbinger of doom imaginable.

Her eyes bulged in disbelief.

"Doctor..."

His legs were a blur. They were almost in the town. "A little...busy..." he answered, between breaths.

"_Doctor..._" she said again, and something in her tone made the Doctor's head turn almost of its own volition. He took in the scene.

"Oh," he said, and impossible though it seemed, increased his pedalling speed yet further.

"Steady as she goes!" Archie bellowed, leaning out of the side window and trying desperately to keep the rocket launcher on an even keel.

"What are you waiting for Archie!" Edie cried, exasperated, flooring the accelerator. "They're right in front of us!"

"Trying my best, Edie!" Archie replied, getting a good lock on the cycling pair now no more than fifty yards ahead.

"This is the best game of tag _ever_, PC Plum!" Miss Hoolie stated, positively glowing with excitement.

Archie launched the missile.

The Doctor threw the trike into a sideways skid, and the missile impacted a red building dead-centre instead. There was a very brief pause, like the cosmos taking a breath, and then –

_Boom._

The explosion fanned outwards, the windows of the shop / cafe disintegrating from within. Glass spewed out, covering Balamory Main Street. The roof of the building simply lifted off from below, flames fountaining from every opening.

"My shop!" Penny Pocket wailed.

"My cafe!" Suzy cried.

"Oh well never mind," Edie said cheerily.

"Yes, chin up," Archie said, now back within the bus again. PC Plum was helping him to reload the rocket launcher. "I'll soon invent a new and even _better _shop and cafe from – "

"Yoghurt pots!" everyone chorused. Archie blushed red.

The bus had come to a halt as the explosion burst out into the street in front of it, lest it be swallowed up whole by the fireball. Now, the flames dying down, Edie carefully circumnavigated the outskirts of the explosion.

"Och, would you believe it," she said, "they've hidden again!"

Indeed, the Doctor and Rose and Spencer's tricycle were nowhere to be seen ahead of them. The Daisy Bus crept forward and everyone looked intently out of their nearest window, scanning Main Street for any sign of the two 'it' players.

"We'll _never_ find them now!" Josie Jump said.

"We need someone who's good at solving mysteries," Miss Hoolie said, confiding this to an empty space beside her on her seat. "Who in Balamory is good at that...?"

**22**

"Stay down," the Doctor hissed.

Rose kept her body pressed hard to the ground. There was a small garden just up the Main Street a little with a wooden fence. They had been thrown off the trike by the explosion behind them, and one of its wheels had buckled on impact. Barely had they had time to leap behind this fence when the Daisy Bus was seen to creep forward through the cloud.

"PC Plum!" came the cry from within that yellow killing machine.

"They'll come looking for us," Rose whispered. "They've got _guns. _They've got _rocket launchers_! How the hell did they get – ?"

"They think they're playing a game," the Doctor replied, desperately. "He has complete power to rewrite how they think. They'll shoot us on sight."

"Right, so which part of that was meant to be comforting?" she returned hotly.

"The part where I lead up to my plan," he said.

"Which is?"

He licked his lips and glanced over at her. "Stay alive until the episode ends?"

"Great plan. I like it. Little vague, but whatever."

"Only one problem."

She closed her eyes and bit her top lip. "Which would be...?"

"Well, from what we've seen, mind-control 'episodes' don't end until the game is played or the problem is resolved. And in this case, shooting us dead would seem to be the game. So you might conclude that this will only end – "

"When we're dead," Rose completed. She was definitely beginning to develop a headache.

"Yeah."

They stopped talking. PC Plum, Miss Hoolie, Penny and Suzy had all disembarked from the Daisy Bus. All were armed with semi-automatic rifles which, in Rose's admittedly gleaned-from-watching-action-movies view, each seemed to be wielding with a distinctly _unfair _level of expertise.

"Right," PC Plum said. "Miss Hoolie and I will look – ahhh..._that _way," and he pointed further down Main Street, "and you two go _that _way," and he indicated back the way they'd came, toward the smoking ruin of the two women's former home.

"Right you are PC Plum!" Suzy saluted smartly with her rifle, bonking herself on the head. Penny shook her head in a long-suffering way.

Rose allowed herself to breathe a little. Both sets were moving away from she and the Doctor's hiding position. Even better, the Daisy Bus was puttering up the hill.

"Shouldn't we search the gardens?" Penny asked suddenly. Rose stiffened in alarm. The four of them were less than ten feet away. It would be all over in seconds.

"Penny..." PC Plum laughed in quite a condescending way. "I don't really think they would have stayed so close. They're probably looking for a _really _good hiding place somewhere else!"

Penny hesitated. From a tiny crack in the fence, not daring to move, Rose saw her suspicious look directly at their sanctuary and thought _I know you. You're the bossy girl in the playground who has to organise every game, referee every sports event, be question-master of every quiz. And right now it kills you that you're being led around by an imbecile…_

"Penny!" chimed PC Plum, right on cue, "we're not going to win this game with you sitting around now, are we!"

"Ooh PC Plum," Miss Hoolie giggled, "I'm glad you're on _my _side!"

They went their separate ways. Rose and the Doctor waited until they were out of sight. The Doctor made as if to move beside her, and only Rose's quick arm tug pulled him back down again.

"They're gone," he said.

"Are they?" she replied. "Look over there."

He looked to the right, and saw what she had seen. Behind a little clump of trees about thirty feet, there was a faint hint of sky blue, and the tiniest bit of a wheel protruding.

"Well," the Doctor inhaled sharply, seeming to be on the verge of losing his patience, "we'll just see about that now, won't we…" and he pulled the sonic screwdriver from his pocket, pressed and twisted…and aimed.

Nothing happened.

"Invisible ray?" Rose said hopefully.

"Non-existent ray," the Doctor said, puzzled. He fiddled with the controls a little more. The screwdriver began to glow. A low rumble started to build to a high-pitched whine.

"Turn it off! Turn it off!"

"I'm trying!" the Doctor replied. He twisted the panel around atop the device and the sound faded away. Rose risked a furtive look at the trees. The blue was still there.

Neither wondered where Suzy was. This was a mistake.

"What's wrong with it?"

Something was definitely troubling the Doctor now. She'd rarely seen him so worried, in fact. He looked at her with genuine fear in his eyes, one of the few times she'd seen him do that. "Nothing," he said, "nothing is wrong with it. I can't…I can't _remember _how to operate it."

Rose felt a chill go through her. "What?"

He fixed her with a stare. "What are nine eights?" he asked.

"What are nine…what are you talking about?"

"Just answer me!"

"Oh alright," she snapped back. Mental arithmetic had never exactly been her strong point, but if she was given a few seconds to think about it (and preferably, a calculator) she could do it. She concentrated. Okay…nine times tables…

Nothing_. Nothing._

No…wait-

"Seventy….two?" she said, uttering each word as if it were a tremendous mental strain. Which, impossibly, it was. She could almost _feel_ her brain hurting as it did the math…

He nodded, as if his worst suspicions had been confirmed. "We're falling under the Balamory effect, just like the townspeople. It's leeching off our higher brain functions."

"That's why you can't work the screwdriver?"

He nodded. "I'm having trouble with my tables. 943 x 174!" he snorted in disgust at himself, "It took me _three seconds_ to get to 164,082!"

Rose blinked. "Yeah…let's get you measured for that big pointed Dunce cap now, eh?"

"You don't understand," he said, "if we don't reverse this effect – even if we _do _find the TARDIS, I won't be able to pilot it. Not like this. We'll be stuck here. Forever."

"Surprise!!!" Suzy Sweet cried out suddenly, popping up from behind the fence. "You're it!"

Before they could move, she took aim and pulled the trigger.

**23**

I watch as the old one pulls the trigger. Typically for her, she has forgotten to remove the safety on the rifle. The Doctor is able to leap over the fence and remove the rifle before she can correct the error. His companion tells him in no uncertain terms that she's not going to punch an old lady in the face. The Doctor, however, is clever. He tells the old one that as part of the game, she has tagged him through their touch and she is now 'It' and must hide. She scampers off merrily to do so. Old fool.

No doubt when my strength wanes and she regains her 'real' self – such as it is – she will wail endlessly on the loss of 'her Jim' until my strength returns and I replace her personality with a more agreeable sort. Is it my fault that 'her Jim', the old moonshine-brewing pipe-smoking rabbit-shooting ingrate, could not be a suitable citizen of my world? How could a child have been around this man? Perhaps if she fails me again, I will reunite her with her lost love.

Now armed, the Doctor and his – companion? mate? servant? – move from cover, giving Penny a bead on their position. She fires on them with astonishing accuracy, coming within a whisker of removing the top of the Doctor's skull. Penny, reliable as ever. If only more of my citizens were like her. But the Doctor is not to be denied. He lays down covering fire – accurate enough to suggest that, were he of a mind to do so, he could have quite easily hit Penny – and buys enough time for he and his…other…to make an escape.

It will be but a temporary reprieve for them. They are succumbing ever quicker to my control, and I have his ship…

His TARDIS…

It sits placidly to my right. I do something I have not done in some years. I move. I move at first with great difficulty, then with only a little less difficulty. Moving is not my strong point now.

The door will not open. I know that. Only with his key can I hope to open it. And once inside…an entire universe, an entire timeline, at my disposal.

Play time will begin.

**24**

He was losing. The Doctor had faced dangers before, but never had he felt so helpless. He had always been able to call on his mind, his experiences, his uncanny ability to survive to pull him out of trouble. But here, that was failing him. He was losing himself, piece by piece, minute by minute, and unless something could be done quickly he would join the citizens of Balamory in properly _existing _for only bare moments out of each day.

Of course, at least he had hundreds of years of adulthood to be chipped away. The process was bound to take quite a while longer than normal. As for others…

"But I _want_ it!" Rose pouted.

"No," he repeated wearily.

Rose was getting more and more…devolved? No…unsophisticated? No…_stroppy_? Yes. There was only one word for it, and that was it. She was becoming a right stroppy cow, a fact she ably demonstrated now as she folded her arms and scowled at him.

"You think I'm a kid," she said.

The Doctor chose diplomacy. "Have you ever handled a semi-automatic rifle before?"

"No. But I could. I'd be _brilliant_."

"No doubt about it. Tell you what – the next one we find, it's yours."

"Yeah right," she drawled sarcastically, inspecting her nails. Boredom descended upon her in a microsecond. It was astonishing to watch. "_Where_ are we going again?"

The Doctor pulled her aside, behind cover. Further up the hill, a bright yellow jumpsuit flashed into view between the rows of begonias like a lioness in the long grass. "Ssh," he admonished her.

"Don't you _ssh _me!"

"Oh for…we're being hunted by people with big guns, if it had slipped your mind, so I'd appreciate it if you muttered your sulks under your breath, like any good teenager should. We're going to the nursery," and under his breath, "appropriately enough..."

"What for?"

As they inched closer to that very destination, during two distinct sets of explanations to Rose, the Doctor slipped from his 600 times tables to his 500. He was no longer confident he could field-strip a proton inhibitor and rearrange it to be a passable instant coffee maker (something that had proven useful during many a war shortage).

One thing he did know for certain. They had to end this episode, get everyone's faculties back. And there was only one place each episode ended.

The only trick would be ending it without getting extremely dead in the process...

**25**

"Gotcha!" PC Plum cried, jumping around the corner of old Mr McTavish's house, spraying bullets.

Safely still behind the corner, Miss Hoolie stood there timidly. "Any luck PC Plum?" she called.

His head poked sheepishly around the corner. "Not _as such_," he replied. "But I did tag the flowers!"

"I don't think they were playing the game, PC Plum," Miss Hoolie reminded him.

He deflated a little more, if that were possible. "No," he admitted.

"Any luck Plummy?" Edie called. She was prowling the opposite side of the street, flattening herself up against the walls of houses merrily before creeping along. She had originally been doing this with Archie, but after several frustrating attempts to explain the subtleties of hand signals to Archie, she had 'suggested' they split up. Archie had gone off in the direction of the nursery, to her relief.

"Not yet. I'm beginning to think we'll _never _find them," PC Plum replied.

"Oh chin up, Plummy, there's a good fellow!" Edie replied heartily.

Miss Hoolie offered him a supportive smile as well. At least, she meant to. Something caught her nose – a smell, and not a pleasant one either. She wrinkled her nose and pinched it between her fingers. "Phew, PC Plum! Something stinks in Mr McTavish's!"

PC Plum sniffed the air experimentally before wafting the air away from him as best he could, coughing. "My goodness! You're quite right, Miss Hoolie!" he agreed.

"Do you think he's gone on holiday and left the milk out on the table again?" Miss Hoolie suggested.

"Could have – you know him!" PC Plum laughed. He became serious in an instant. "Hmm – I should probably go in and investigate. If there is a cause of the bad smell-"

There was.

It was Mr McTavish's body in the bath, pale and dead, bloated and floating.

PC Plum and Miss Hoolie stood at the bathroom door, looking down at the scene. There was a tension in the air, as if something invisible were being put under tremendous strain. Sweat beaded out on the foreheads of both. Miss Hoolie's free hand shook. Almost unconsciously, it found its way into PC Plum's grip.

He squeezed. The guns they were holding clattered to the tiles below.

Downstairs they walked, with not a word passed between them. Miss Hoolie picked up the piece of card from the kitchen table with the horse and SRRY written over it.

Her vision blurred.

They walked out of the house.

"There you are!" Edie called. She pointed to the skies above. "Have you seen the weather?"

They looked. It had been another perfect sunny day not ten minutes ago. Now, dark clouds were gathering apace above the town. Out to sea, there was a flash, followed by a rumble of thunder.

He was losing them, and he knew it.

"I need to get…" Miss Hoolie said, each word a Herculean effort, "…to the nursery."

"Where's your tag stick?" Edie asked, approaching him curiously. Something was amiss, she could tell. Miss Hoolie dabbed at her eyes furtively, as if afraid anyone would see. "Plummy, you're missing yours too. Do you want us to lose this game?"

PC Plum fixed her with a stare that didn't belong. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice hoarse.

"Game's over," he said.

**26**

Spencer was bored. He'd wanted to stake out the beach, or maybe the ice-cream shop (in reality it was a cake shop, but when he went in good old Mrs Canvey always got him an ice-cream from the freezer), but no – they'd stuck him in the nursery.

Not that the nursery wasn't fun. He had played games with the children, of course. They seemed a little off today, a little quiet. Spencer attributed this to Miss Hoolie being elsewhere – only natural. After all, normally the children were _fantastic_ fun, weren't they?

He shook his head. Something had seemed to tickle his brain there for a second. Spencer chuckled wryly to himself – maybe he was getting thirsty for a cup of tea!

He set down the tag stick on the play area and wandered off to the kitchen to get the kettle. A nice cup of tea would get him thinking straight, that was for sure!

He'd barely left the entrance area when a figure appeared through the glass. It mouthed something to its companion, who achieved new heights of eye-rolling in response.

Spencer flicked the kettle to boil and checked the tea caddy. No tea bags...ah! They'd be in Miss Hoolie's cupboard! He strode there now, walking across the entrance area just as the two figures outside were engaged in a intense debate with each other. Neither party saw the other.

The Doctor pushed open the nursery door as silently as he could. None of the children looked up.

"Coming?" he whispered pointedly.

"Wouldn't miss it," Rose intoned, slinking in.

"Sit there and...stay out of trouble," the Doctor said, giving her a warning look. He looked at where the children were playing, inhaled apprehensively (completely missing the gesture Rose aimed at him) and moved over to them.

Rose flopped down on one of the play tables, sighing massively. Her eyes darted...and alighted.

Right next to her was one of the rifles.

"All _right_..." she said, delighted, scooping it up.

The Doctor heard this, turned. Saw. "Where did you-" he began.

The kettle began to whistle as it boiled.

A cupboard door slammed shut.

Spencer stepped from the cupboard alcove, to face the Doctor and Rose. He had a box of tea bags in his hands. There was a moment of shock as both parties reacted to the appearance of the other. Rose swung the rifle up to cover him, took a step back. She'd been shot at. She didn't like being shot at. She didn't plan to have it happen to her again.

The Doctor's eyes widened.

"Rose," he said carefully, "give me the gun."

"Rose! Doc!" Spencer said ruefully. "You two are _so _sneaky! Guess you got the drop on me, huh!"

Rose's nostrils flared dangerously. She stopped retreating and began to advance, the gun barrel never wavering from being pointed directly at Spencer's chest.

"You _shot _at us!" she said softly. "You're all _crazy_. I could have been killed!"

Spencer's mouth opened and closed. The Doctor could see Rose's words bouncing off the strange thrall he – and increasingly, the Doctor and Rose – were under. They didn't compute, and so somehow they were rewired, reworded, into words that did. By the time they reached Spencer's brain, they were vastly changed.

"Aw, you guys don't have to rub it in!" he said. "So I didn't get to tag you. I'll do better next time, you just wait and see!"

"Spencer, this might be a good time to stop talking," the Doctor said, increasingly concerned.

"_Next_ time?" Rose said, her voice shrill. She was building to a crescendo-

"Rose," he said desperately, "you've got to listen to me. We're both falling under the mind control effect. It's making you behave like a child."

"Oh no it isn't," Rose retorted.

"Oh yes it is!" Spencer responded automatically, and chuckled.

Rose blinked. The Doctor saw his chance.

"Rose Tyler," he pressed again softly, "you're not a child. You left your home, everything you knew, your entire world, and you agreed to come away with me and face dangers and worlds like few humans have ever known. And you did it blind, yes, but when you saw everything the universe had to throw at you – you didn't run back to Mum. You didn't wimp out. You chose to stay. You're one of the bravest people I've ever known," he spread his arms wide and laughed, "Rose Tyler, who had the power of Time itself coursing through her veins! Are you really going to let yourself shoot this man because you're feeling _stroppy_?"

The fog behind Rose's eyes seemed to clear. The rifle stopped pointing at Spencer's chest. She looked over at him, grinning with gratitude and pride at his words. "Not likely," she said, and he could have hugged her.

Did hug her.

Saved her life.

"Got you!" Archie called merrily, unseen and unheard entering the nursery front door.

He fired. It was a short burst, but it was accurate. Three bullets tore through the Doctor. Rose saw his face register its surprise before his body became a deadweight against hers.

"NO!" she screamed.

"NO!" Miss Hoolie echoed from the door. She flew at an astonished Archie, knocking him to the ground before he could fire again.

Rose could only let the Doctor's body concertina slowly to the nursery floor as chaos unfolded around her. Blood was beginning to seep through his shirt and jacket. She put her ear to his chest – heartbeats. Strong, if incredibly fast. He was alive.

Archie was trying manfully to reach his gun. He was laughing, clearly imagining Miss Hoolie to have instigated some side-game of wrestling. He had called to Spencer for assistance and Spencer had responded with (a little too much) gusto, preparing to throw himself at Miss Hoolie-

-and had instead been rugby-tackled mid-leap by a PC Plum howling like a warrior chieftain.

"Leave her _alone_!" PC Plum roared.

"Doctor? Doctor...Doctor?" Rose kept repeating his name. Alive he might be, but he was unconscious. Her hands were now covered in blood. She felt dizzy. She had just gotten used to him this way. Was he about to change form again? What would he become this time? Blonde? Six foot? Ginger?

A woman...?

She shook her head free of such crazy thoughts. "Doctor!" she tried again.

"Whoa, Plum! Take it easy!" Spencer grunted, using his surprising physical strength to wriggle free of Plum's grasp. "We're all on the same team here!"

"Are we hell, perv," Plum growled, and thumped him in the face. He went down like a stone. Plum shoved him aside and advanced on Archie.

"Er...steady on, old chap," Archie said, a look of concern manifesting in his face as something about Plum's expression managed to pervade the mind control. He released Miss Hoolie from his grip and then made a pretty good show of pretending he'd never had her there in the first place.

"Look," Miss Hoolie pointed outside the nursery. The remainder of the Balamory contingent – Josie, Edie, Penny and Suzy – were advancing quickly on the nursery entrance.

"Finish it Kerrie," Plum instructed her, "finish it quick."

Miss Hoolie dashed to the special chair.

"Help him!" Rose cried desperately. "Somebody help us!"

"We _are_ helping," Plum replied coarsely, "c'mon pinkie, let's go meet and greet."

He grabbed a flabbergasted Archie by the scruff of the neck and thrust them both outside to face the crowd just about to break upon the nursery.

"Well," Miss Hoolie began to intone in a sing-song voice, sweat dripping from her forehead, "what was the story in Balamory today? Well…!"

Rose wept.

"Hello everyone," PC Plum said, releasing Archie. Strong winds swept around the nursery driveway, bringing it with the first rains of the approaching storm and forcing Archie into some emergency hand manoeuvres with his kilt.

"Plummy," Edie returned his greeting with a curt nod. "We heard-"

"Yes," he interrupted her, "it's over. Archie found them and tagged them. So...big well done to Archie, and I daresay that's the end of the game."

"Ooh, well done Archie!" Suzy bubbled.

"…it all began when everyone came to the nursery and Archie told me he and Penny had had the most _wonderful _idea for a big game of tag!" Miss Hoolie continued, not taking a breath to pause, her face going red, her voice dropping an octave and rasping with hoarseness.

"Oh, well..." Archie blushed. "You know, trying my best and all that. But I say Plummers, I wasn't sure I got bot_-owwww!_" and the sentence dissolved into pain as he began to hop madly.

"So sorry Archie, did I step on your foot?" PC Plum inquired. Rain had begun to lash down from the black clouds above, which seemed to hover about twenty feet above their heads.

"Something's not right about this," Penny remarked, fixing Plum with a disconcertingly piercing stare. "Are ya absolutely _sure _the game is over, PC Plum?"

Quite by accident it seemed, her gun had raised to point at him. Plum looked at her and realised something that froze the pit of his stomach. She was free of the control, just as he was.

She had been free for _ages_...

"We had a _great _time searching all over the island for the Doctor and Rose – but it was Archie who eventually tracked them down to right here at the nursery! Afterward everyone agreed that it was the best game of tag ever!" Miss Hoolie croaked.

"This has been the best game of tag ever!" chorused everyone outside.

"...and it's not over yet," Penny alone continued, her eyes still calmly fixed on PC Plum. "Cos I think we really have to choose someone else to be _it _now, don't we?"

"And that was the story in Balamory-"

"How about _you, _PC Plum?"

Plum swung his rifle up in response. "How about _both_ of us?" he replied evenly.

"-I'll see you next time. Goodbye!"

Lightning struck.

Penny and PC Plum fired at the same time.

Miss Hoolie vanished.

So did the guns, and the bullets with them. Plum had the awful, fleeting impression of a bullet losing all sense of solidity at the _exact_ microsecond it was due to pass right through his head.

Six people, four newly restored, stood in a circle in the pouring rain.

"Oh my God," Archie said, as memories came flooding back of 'tag sticks'. "What have I-" and he turned and ran back into the nursery, leaving five in the rain.

Without a word, four of those five converged on the fifth.

"I think it's time we had a word, Penny," PC Plum said.

**27**

I must rest. Extending myself over the island as I do is not easy. The people here will have twenty of their minutes in which to act like the animals they are before I have the strength to return.

In that time, I am vulnerable.

But he is wounded. And they are at each other's throats. They will never be able to reach me in time. And when my control returns, I will have them bring me the key, and I will have access to the unlimited power a TARDIS offers.

There will be no need to hide anymore. I will emerge. Balamory will emerge, and act as a blueprint for this entire world.

Oh, we will have such _adventures_.

**28**

"Which one of you hit me?" Spencer moaned, rising to his feet. He registered the sight of Archie and Rose crouched over the Doctor's prone body. "Whoa…never mind," he added hurriedly, and wandered over to Miss Hoolie's cupboard. He returned a few seconds later with a bottle of whiskey. It was _amazing_ what that cupboard contained if you knew where to look.

"Two hearts?"

"Don't ask," Rose told Archie. "Just help me get him to a doctor."

"Here?" Archie raised his eyebrows. "Out of luck there I'm afraid."

Spencer tossed them a package he'd retrieved with his non-whiskey-grabbin' hand. It was the First Aid kit, emblazoned with a big red cross lest anyone miss it. "Here," he grunted, taking a huge swig from the bottle. He had twenty minutes to get rat-assed and it would be his wussy alter-ego which would get the roaring hangover. _Which coloured house will I be throwing up in? Tell me, what do you think?_

Archie began to unroll bandages. Together he and Rose managed to stop the bleeding. "The bullets have gone," Archie observed. "Vanished like the others. That's something, at least."

He was looking at her with lost eyes. Her initial reaction – to tell him where to stick his _that's something _– died in her throat, the Doctor's little speech about Rose Tyler, young woman beyond her years echoing in her mind still.

She placed her hand on his arm, gently. "It wasn't you," she said.

He looked away, unable to meet her gaze. His eyes flicked to the nursery clock. "Eighteen minutes left," he said, urgently. "You have to get as far away from the rest of us as possible."

"Hey!" Spencer spluttered, a quarter of a bottle down and showing no signs of slowing down. "That's my job! I'm countdown guy!"

Ignoring him, Rose shook her head at Archie. "It's affecting us too now. Next time it begins, we'll be as caught up in it as the rest of you. We'll probably decide to play catch off a cliff somewhere."

"Then what do we do?"

"We finish it," Plum interrupted. Framed in the doorway, his jaw set and his eyes gleaming with purpose, Rose found it hard to reconcile him with the bumbling chinstrap-sporting PC who had greeted them to the town. "We finish it, right now."

**29**

"Godspeed," Suzy whispered, as she watched the Daisy Bus drive away. As it vanished down the hill, her attention shifted from it to the person sitting next to her in the nursery. Suzy trembled with anger as she did so.

"What are you looking at?" Penny demanded.

"I haven't a clue anymore," Suzy replied, but she had to ask. She simply had to. "Why? Why the hell would you _help _this…this thing? After what it's done to us?"

Penny's defiant expression evaporated somewhat. "You want to know?" she replied bitterly. "Who was I, Suzy? Before this?"

"You were the Sweeney's wee daughter. You used to come into the shop with your Mam after they moved here. We all clubbed together and had that fun run in '97 to get you the fancy new wheelchair!" Suzy replied indignantly. Her legs had ached for _three days _after that run.

"What was my name?"

"Your name? Well it was…och, I do know, I remember it was up on that big banner above the start and finish line! Let's see now…"

"Was I there, that day?"

"Yes of cou-"

"_No I wasn't!_" Penny fired back, incandescent with rage. "I was _at home_ because I was in too much _pain _to be there! And not a single one of you noticed, or if you did you were so _pleased_ with yourselves for being such charitable souls you didn't care!"

Tears were running down her face now. "I was the poor Sweeney lass who people held open doors for and clucked sympathetically when I went past and raised money for. I was a rallying point for the community. I made people feel good for running for charity for me. But you know what? I didn't want any of that. I wanted people to be friends with me cos they'd met me and they liked me, not cos I looked _so _brave in my chair."

She trailed off. Suzy couldn't find words to reply.

"And when he – it – took control, it all changed. I was Penny Pocket. I was in charge of your shop. I had a job and _you _worked for _me _and everyone knew who met us that I was the brains of the operation, because you were just a silly old biddy and I was always having to fix your mess ups. Penny Pocket was gonna organise ya! Supervise ya! Super surprise ya!" she smiled weakly. "Yeah, it might have been for stupid, simple problems that a moron could have solved in five seconds…but I didn't care. People _needed_ me."

"And you think if everything goes back to normal, that will change?"

"Won't it?" Penny asked despondently, her head hung.

"I don't know," Suzy replied truthfully. She looked out over Balamory bay, and saw the yellow flash of the Daisy Bus vanish at top speed into the surrounding countryside. "I don't know if we'll ever get the chance to find out."


	4. Part 4

**30**

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

"For what?"

"You were right. I attract trouble. I used to think it was just random, but…" he was interrupted by a coughing fit which included a disturbing amount of blood, "it's me. I love trouble. And the TARDIS knows it. That's why we get monsters, explosions and spaceships instead of chips. I'm sorry."

He was expecting her to rant, to rave. Instead, she smiled. "Don't you ever listen to your own little speeches?" she asked him. "I went into that police box and I came out someone totally different _cos _of all the crazy things we've seen and done. I wouldn't swap my time with you for anything. And I bet anyone in my place would say the same thing."

Just like that, the weight of all those he'd lost over the years seemed to lift from him. He sat up, with some difficulty, her hands supporting him all the way. "Oh, are we _still_ on that island?" he said, touching his bandages and wincing, "I thought that one with the numbers and the crazy French girl was bad…"

"We're going for your ship," PC Plum told him. The Daisy Bus was again full to the rafters with the usual suspects, save Penny and Suzy.

"Yeahhhh!" Spencer agreed, from somewhere on the floor. "Thirty-fourteen minutes!"

"We tried this. There's some sort of cloaking technology operating that I can't penetrate," the Doctor reminded them.

"Ah," came Archie's tremulous voice, as he raised a finger. "I, ah, I believe I might be able to help there..."

**31**

"I can't believe this," Rose stated flatly.

They were assembled in the large, empty field as before. Less than ten minutes remained before they'd all become mindless child-zombies again. And their great hope, their one chance, lay in the Doctor's hands.

"Here goes," he said, and raised the forcefield-lowerer device.

Made entirely from yoghurt pots.

Alone perhaps amongst the rest, when Archie's body and mind were being hi-jacked, he didn't thrash around immovably for help, didn't scream silently behind unresponsive lips. He considered. He had come to Balamory a rich man, inventor of an anti-virus program back when such things were relatively new on the IT horizon. He had made an almost instant fortune from the commercial rights to the code. He had no interest in the city, in the jobs that computer firms threw at him.

He moved here for the peace and the quiet and the chance to _think_. And when the mind control had begun, he had found himself reinvented as Archie the Inventor, who knew how things were done, and who could make absolutely _anything_. Granted, all he ever seemed to make were clip-clop puppets and crudely drawn magic boxes with 'secret' access flaps you could drive a 4x4 through, but what it proved to him was that the roles they had been assigned were based upon their own personalities.

If this being had the power to rewrite reality, to hide entire towns and puppet entire populations in order to create personas to appeal to his inner child – no, _children_ – then, Archie reasoned, the creations themselves had to have some power in this world created for them. After all, his puppets and magic boxes always worked. Why shouldn't a dimensional space-time phase-shifting forcefield disseminator made entirely of yoghurt pots?

For someone whom he'd shot repeatedly in the back at pointblank range, the Doctor had looked at him with a profound mixture of gratitude and respect upon hearing this reasoning.

"Nothing's happening," Miss Hoolie observed.

"Maybe it's the wrong flavour yoghurt," Edie suggested dryly.

Like Rose, she had been less than convinced by Archie's plan. The Doctor had already surmised that Edie seemed to have little patience for anything she couldn't drive or boss into submission.

"Or maybe you haven't turned it on," Archie said, in a _how could you be so silly _tone of voice. He plucked the device from the Doctor's hands, gave the left-most pot a twist, and aimed-

More than one child-unfriendly word escaped the lips of the watchers.

The world's biggest playhouse had just popped into existence. Ten storeys high, two hundred feet across, it towered over them, an Acropolis of flimsy cloth and clear-plastic windows.

Spencer, swaying like a tree in a typhoon, looked up at the playhouse and then down at the bottle he was carrying. His mouth opened, then closed. "Bah," he said disgustedly, flinging the bottle away.

The Doctor consulted his sonic screwdriver once again. The TARDIS' signal flashed loud and clear and strong, straight ahead. He whooped for sheer joy. "It's there!"

They poured forward, through cathedral-tall entrance doors of polythene, PC Plum's order to advance as needless as it was heartfelt.

"Matty! Tyler!" Miss Hoolie called out, as they spread out beyond the doors. Inside, the playhouse was laid out like a cross between a palace and an adventure playground. Chandeliers hung above huge coloured ball pits. Almost every patch of springy, play-safe marble-effect floor either squeaked or played nursery rhymes as they walked upon it.

And before them, huge brightly-coloured escalators wound their way up from the entrance hall, snaking up to adjoining corridors, looping and swerving over one another like mini rollercoasters. The _thum, thum, thum _sound of escalator motors lapped at their ears, mixing with the discordant symphonies of a hundred different children's melodies.

"Oh…" Rose said simply, lost for words.

"Bloody hell," Edie breathed.

"Incredible. Dali meets _Sesame Street_," the Doctor said wonderingly, jumping from side to side and playing _Chopsticks _on the floor as he did so.

"How does he have all this power?" Rose asked, dumbstruck.

"He can bend reality with his mind," the Doctor replied, "all Therkans could. But I've never seen it done to this level before…"

"We don't have time," PC Plum snapped. "Which way?"

"Come on everyone! This way!" Josie cried, stepping onto the blue escalator. Archie's desperate lunge to stop her missed by inches.

There was an electric _crackle _and a horrible sound, like balloons popping. For a moment the lights seemed to dim and the music to fade, and when the lights came up-

"Where did she…" Rose said faintly.

"She's gone," the Doctor said, numb.

As seconds went by, they froze in place, and might have stayed that way for too long if Miss Hoolie hadn't stepped forward. She strode to the nexus point of the escalators before anyone could stop her, turned. "Coloured," she said, pointing, "coloured for _us_. Look."

She stepped onto the green escalator. "No!" PC Plum gasped, but by the time he had taken steps forward he could see already that she was right, and unharmed.

"What are you all _waiting_ for?" she shouted down to them, and began to vault the steps three at a time.

Spurred on by her example, the remainder split into their colour groups and charged up the matching escalators, leaving only the Doctor and Rose behind and the red and yellow escalators unoccupied.

Rose glanced down at herself. She was still wearing the bright red top she'd been sporting since the beginning. She glanced at the Doctor, who read her expression. "I don't know," he replied.

"Behind you!" Archie's voice cried out from above. "The floor!"

Starting with the entranceway and spreading like a cancer, the multicoloured patchwork floor was dissolving into nothingness. There was no way to tell if the bottomless pit yawning up was real or imaginary. Rose didn't plan to find out. She leapt onto the red escalator, bracing herself as best a person can for disintegration, and found only solidity and slow upward movement.

But the Doctor...

"You're not yellow!" she said desperately.

He grinned at her, but there was little amusement within the smile. "Don't worry," he said, stepping onto the yellow escalator without harm, "he _wants_ me to get there intact."

Close enough to touch, she smiled at him, before they both began to make up ground on the others still ascending above. Rose risked a glance below when she judged herself to have moved up enough, and wished she hadn't. Oblivion was rising, and rising fast.

"Looks like we're going to the penthouse," the Doctor panted, as the yellow escalator swooped over hers. She was disturbed to see him so out of breath; she suspected that his fitness levels were far beyond those of normal humans, but then for a guy bleeding from three bullet holes, he was doing commendably well.

The escalators terminated up ahead on a landing, all seven meandering paths converging so they were side-by-side before merging into the landing's surface itself. Miss Hoolie and PC Plum were already there. Edie and Spencer joined them.

Rose, the Doctor and Archie were the last remaining. Archie's cheeks were as red as rubies from the exhertion. He looked ruefully across at Rose as they reached the levelling-out section, grateful for the climb stopping. "Always hated these things," he revealed, "used to think as a child that I was going to-"

"_Don't say it!_" the Doctor erupted, but it was too late.

Rose saw Archie's body twitch. Then again. She wondered what was happening and then realised with horror - he was trying to move his legs.

And he was failing.

Ahead, the escalator _thum, thum, thummed _into a small opening, with the landing coming in a half-step above it.

"Oh God no oh please God no - " Archie began to gibber incoherently, bending and pulling frantically at his legs and feet, trying something, anything to make them move before-

Everyone moved to help him at the same moment.

All of them much too late.

Archie had time to turn and Rose saw clearly the utter terror in his eyes in the instant before, with a _grinding_ and a _sucking_ noise she would remember too long after, his entire body was sucked impossibly and completely into the mechanism.

"Archie...oh dear God in heaven, _Archie!_" Edie screamed, sobbing on her knees inches from where it had happened, her hand outstretched, now to nothing.

Rose leapt off her escalator. The Doctor did the same. She was never more relieved to feel her legs move from beneath her at her command. By the time they impacted the landing, however, much of the strength had gone from them through sheer shock.

PC Plum was looking down. "We can't stay here," he stated, trying to sound matter-of-fact about the small matter of the house being sucked into the void less than twenty feet below.

"Just so y'know, this is the _worst _hangover cure ever invented," Spencer stated, putting the palms of his hands against his temple and pressing, hard, as if he hoped to erase the world.

Coloured lights began running in a straight line overhead, on the ceiling, which doubled as the floor of the landing above their heads. They ran to a series of perfectly circular holes in the wall, each barely big enough to admit a person crawling. Above each was a child's drawing.

The Doctor was the first to reach them. "Drawings of us," he said.

"Where do they go? Are we just supposed to climb in there? We don't know where they go!" Edie protested, her words running together. She was losing it. "After what happened to Archie-"

"We stay here, we die," the Doctor said mildly. He pointed wordlessly to a hole above which had been daubed a crude stick figure of a blue person driving a yellow circular blob.

Rose began to search for hers as, around her, the others identified their own. PC Plum sought a nod from the Doctor before plunging in. He got one, and vanished into the hole. Miss Hoolie was next. Muttering darkly, Spencer took his turn and was swallowed by the blackness.

"Find yours?" the Doctor asked her.

Rose put her hand over a picture of a girl standing next to a man standing next to a box. There was a very large, very pink heart prominently displayed between the girl and man. "Yes," she said, marvelling that she found the time to be embarrassed even at a time like this.

She, the Doctor and Edie paused at the entrances to their tunnels. Edie shot her a look full of despair and terror, and Rose feared for her in that moment.

In the next, she was into the darkness.

**32**

That they have come so far, so quicky - remarkable. I had never suspected them capable of such things, and yet I have walked abroad within their minds for many years now.

In the bleak expanses I have created, one of their minds is crazed with terror above the others. It shines to me like a beacon, its naked fear harking back to the pureness of childhood certainties about things lurking in dark places. Children, I have learned, do not fear that there are monsters in the dark.

Children _know _there are monsters in the dark.

What they fear, what they wake up soaked in sweat having dreamt, is that one day their turn will come.

I reach out and make someone's dream come true.

**33**

"What is it?" Alison's reflection asked her, quirking her head to one side. "You look all scrunched up. You've got that scrunched-up face going on."

Edie raised her eyebrows, horrified. "Scrunched-up face?!" she repeated, deeply offended.

She saw Alison walk over to her in the mirror, but decided to close her eyes and allow herself to scent her lover's approach, her neck to feel the soft kiss Alison planted there.

"Still my gorgeous," Alison whispered. "So what is it? We've got half an hour before the ferry arrives so whatever it is, make it quick..."

"Just remembering a dream," Edie replied, her eyes still closed.

"Bad?"

"Yes," she admitted.

Her eyes were closed. That explained the darkness. Because her eyes were closed. Ergo, darkness. She had wanted to close them.

But it was a lie. Her eyes were open, open and staring, wide and terrified, and the darkness was all around her, and Alison and her kisses long gone. There was only her, and the darkness.

No. Another lie.

Something was here with her. Something moving. Something close. It breathed wetly, hotly ahead of her, and behind her too, as only monsters can. But she knew that this monster had been waiting for her all along. It was her time.

Her choking scream echoed through the tunnels, and then was gone.

**34**

Light. Rose almost wept with relief. Her knees ached, her neck ached, but she pushed onward, scurrying through the tunnel as that blessed speck of light up ahead grew bigger. Her mind, ever the traitor, conjured up all kinds of noises and scenarios – what if she heard something behind her, now? What if it caught up with her and dragged her back into the black with her questing fingertips mere inches from safety?

_What if I shut the hell up_, she thought determinedly, and kept going until she was able to clamber down and out of her own personal little hellhole.

Miss Hoolie and PC Plum were embracing, briefly, out of sheer relief to still be here no doubt. Spencer was standing a little way apart, glowering but there, reassuring somehow in his big bright orange clothes and white coveralls.

"Doctor?"

"Here," he answered from her right, to her immense relief. He had just reached the end of his own tunnel and, wincing still with his wounds, was able to step down with her assistance.

"Edie…?" Miss Hoolie asked, her voice not containing much hope.

The Doctor shook his head.

"There are only five tunnels," Rose said. "How can there only be five? We went into six."

"He knew she'd never make it all the way," the Doctor replied.

"He's picking us off one by one!" Spencer moaned, throwing his hands up in despair. "Don't any of you _understand_ that? We're all gonna die!"

Rose took in their new surroundings. Somehow despite crawling in what had felt like a straight line, which should have seen them go right through the massive walls of the play house, they had instead ended up a few more levels and on the opposite end of the structure. She walked to the edge of the landing and looked downward. Oblivion was ascending still.

Spencer was still in the throes of all-out panic. "I give up!" he cried suddenly to the house at large. "I want to go back to Balamory! I'll paint my stupid pictures and play my tunes for you, ok? Just don't let me die in this place – _please_…"

The holes they had emerged from vanished. One reappeared a moment later. Rather than darkness, it displayed a view of Balamory, of the field in which the play house stood. The smell of the countryside poured through, the sounds.

"Portal…" Spencer whispered.

Above the portal, the number 5 appeared. It clicked to 4 as they watched. Then to 3.

"Spencer, NO!" PC Plum roared, and grabbed the other man by the arm. They wrestled desperately. Rose expected the Doctor to help, but he only watched, a strange vacancy in his face.

3 became 2. 2 became 1 and a half. Then 1 and a quarter.

"Sorry _Plummy_," Spencer retorted, twisting Plum's arm with his own until the larger man was forced to release him. "Don't wanna be late!"

He stepped through the portal, and in one awful moment of realisation it came to him that the view of the field he had seen was coming from above it. An awful long way above it.

And yet he hung there. Hung there and was actually able to turn, nine storeys up, three feet from the portal and the horrified faces watching him, the arms reaching for him.

"Why don't I fall?" he said, and promptly dropped like a stone.

The sound of a human body becoming a broken, boneless ruin far below carried up to the onlookers.

Rose could hardly process anything now. Sounds, voices seemed to come to her as if she were underwater. She was aware of the Doctor approaching her, his mouth moving, but her ears and her brain just didn't seem to be getting along right now.

"Doctor!" PC Plum was shouting. "We don't have any time! Where do we go now? What do we do?"

They were on a landing not connected to any of the others below. There were no tunnels, no arrows, nothing but twenty square feet of isolated surface separating them from the rising tide of nothing, now little more than ten feet below.

"We're here!" the Doctor cried. "You can shoot us, trick us, brainwash us, but you don't dare face us? You, a soldier of Therka? A veteran of the Time War? _Afraid_?" he snorted in derisive laughter. "Is this what your people died for? So you could go and invent _playtime _for yourself? You're pathetic!"

The rising dark was upon them, was practically underfoot, when it stopped its advance.

"I'm back," Rose said, unsteadily. She clutched the Doctor for support and yes, because it felt good. "Did I miss anything?"

"Just me taunting the alien who holds our lives in his hands like playthings."

"Oh," she said, and paused to consider this. "Good. In fact – " and she stepped forward herself and cupped her hands to her mouth, to his amazement and pride, "it's ABOUT TIME SOMEONE TOLD YOU EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE! YOU HAVE ALL THIS POWER, ALL THIS FREEDOM, AND YOU SIT HERE AND MAKE THESE PEOPLE'S LIVES A MISERY BECAUSE YOU'RE SULKING YOU NEVER GOT _ATTENTION_ AS A CHILD? GROW UP, YOU BABY!"

Satisfied, but still seething with rage, she stepped back.

"You were actually _listening_ earlier when I told you all that?" the Doctor hissed.

"Course."

He never got a chance to add anything further. In the centre uppermost ceiling of the play house, a huge iris opened. An escalator seemed to _grow _right before their eyes, connecting to the end of the platform on which they stood, stretching upward through the iris above.

"Looks like you got his attention," PC Plum said.

"I'll get his attention," Miss Hoolie said as she stepped first onto the escalator, her husband a step behind her, "I'll kill him."

"Sounds like a plan," the Doctor commented, as they followed.

**35**

"What's the story in Balamory!" Miss Hoolie asked brightly.

"Sing Balamory with me!" PC Plum said cheerfully.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Miss Hoolie said, as she turned over the doll of herself in her hands. She pressed the stomach of the doll again and, rather than the doll spouting a phrase, she herself briefly assumed a vacant doll-like stare before pronouncing with enthusiasm, "Who's coming to visit us at the Balamory nursery today?"

They had stepped off the summit of the escalator moments before, into a mountain of toys. Dolls of the townspeople were everywhere. Edie's Daisy Bus had its own radio controlled models. There were miniature models of Balamory town itself. Picture books. Jigsaws. It was an absolute deluge of Balamory-themed goods of every conceivable size, shape and description.

"This is how he views us?" PC Plum asked, though it wasn't really a question at all.

The Doctor simply nodded. "He's turned you, your neighbours, your entire town, into his own private childhood toy set. Anything that didn't fit with that, he erased."

"Not erased, Doctor," a new voice corrected him. It had originated from through the toy mountain. There was something distinctly odd about it, but Rose pushed that aside for the moment as the four of them scrambled over the toys, with Miss Hoolie and PC Plum occasionally forced to spout nonsense as their foot pressed the stomach of their doll _doppelganger_.

At the other side of the toys was a huge television screen, fully thirty feet high and fifty feet wide. The huge display was split up into hundreds of smaller feeds, each one showing a portion of the island, the town, even inside houses and rooms.

In front of this huge screen were two things. The first was the TARDIS. Rose had to restrain the urge to throw herself down the remainder of the toy hill and scramble to its wonderfully familiar squat blue shape, scramble inside and lock the door shut against the universe until she and she alone decided to open it again. It was home to her now, home in a way that her room in her Mum's flat hadn't been for years. She was past caring or feeling guilty about that just now.

And the second-

He sat a in a chair hooked up to the instrumentation. He was humanoid, as so many of the galaxy's citizens seemed to be. A tube protruded from somewhere within the chair and ran into the corner of his mouth. Fluid was transferring through it. He was thin, painfully so, and his skin was blue-ish grey, whether as a result of his alien origins or his condition she couldn't tell.

But what stopped PC Plum and Miss Hoolie in their tracks as they charged toward him, fuelled by rage, was not his frailty.

It was that he was no more than six years old.

"Who _are_ you?" PC Plum demanded, when his voice returned enough for him to trust it to speak.

"When I was birthed, I was given the designation HYT102," the boy replied. He had the voice of a normal six-year-old. That was what had bothered Rose earlier.

"Catchy," the Doctor commented. "But what do you call yourself now?"

"I like…Philip," the little figure said, after a pause. "It is nice. And normal."

"You're just a child," Miss Hoolie said, disbelieving. She was in a very confusing place emotionally. She had stored up a gigantic, cathartic mass of hatred and vengeance for unleashing upon this being, hatred borne out of her love for her sons, and yet now she was confronted with a child who looked not unlike Matty. Her hatred had nowhere to go. She felt dizzy.

"He's making himself _look_ like a child, Kerrie," Plum guessed, taking a step forward. "Look at the powers he has. The things he can do. It's a trick."

"No," the Doctor said softly. "He's Therkan. Bred for war. From birth they accelerated his mental development, made him an adult in his mind. But the physical bodies remain normal."

Philip inclined his head, smiled faintly. "I was a decorated war pilot by my second year. Dalek weaponry was designed against large-scale ships. We were perfect for tiny craft that could evade their fire."

Try as she might, Rose couldn't get the image of a two-year-old piloting a starfighter out of her mind. "But you drifted here for years," she spoke up, "and you've been controlling the people for years. You should look older."

"Bred for war," Philip echoed the Doctor's words, bitterness evident in his tone. "Not for life. We were not expected to live beyond six years, except for those of us captured. So our bodies are designed to break down after six years," his voice was hollow with anger, "by then, we will have served our purpose ."

"Why?" PC Plum asked. "Why did you do this to us?"

"You took away my sons," Miss Hoolie said.

"Yes. I was jealous. Why should they live this life in this paradise and I have lived mine? Where is the justice? All I had was power, the power in my ship, the powers of my race. I used those powers to create what I never was given. My childhood. Taken from the minds of children like Matty and Tyler. How I have made you is how they see you. And to watch it, again and again – oh!" and that thin, blue-veined mouth smiled with pleasure. "It is marvellous. It is wonderful. I have lived on far beyond my body's date for breaking down because of that gift."

"You feed on it," Rose said, nauseated. "You're an innocence vampire."

"As you wish," Philip shrugged. "But it is not enough. I can feel my body is close to death. And then, like a children's wish, you dropped from the sky, Doctor. With your TARDIS' power…" that frail body shivered with anticipation, "Balamory is just the beginning."

PC Plum was trembling with rage. He cast a desperate look at Rose and the Doctor and she could guess the source of his torment – more than anything, he wanted to raise his fists and plough right through this figure of malevolence, strike it again and again and try to excise some of the years of hurt and loss it had caused. But he couldn't hurt a child. He just couldn't.

"I was there," the Doctor said. "I was there when Therka fell. They made me watch."

"You're lying. I was in your mind. As you saw my life, so I did yours."

"Time Lords aren't so simple to read. Try again," the Doctor pressed.

Philip was silent for a moment. Only for a moment. The Doctor gasped a little and took a step backward. Rose moved to help him but he waved her away, clutching his temple. Philip, meanwhile, had gone even paler than usual. His thin blue chest, covered with simple red cloth, began to flutter as his breathing became sporadic.

The play house around them began to change. The walls melted away to blackness, but not the rising oblivion that had threatened them; this was space, flecked with stars, . The toyroom / video room they were standing in became the bridge of a starship.

A starship full of Daleks.

She turned involuntarily, her first instinct to grab the Doctor, to run, to scream. As she turned however to begin her flight her arm and torso passed _through _a Dalek who was cantering from the upper tier of the bridge to the lower.

"What's happening?" poor Miss Hoolie wailed.

"It's a memory, I think," Rose assured her. "We're inside a memory." Miss Hoolie and PC Plum were clinging for dear life to one another.

In addition to the Daleks, another newcomer had joined the complement. He was older than the Doctor, with blonde curly hair and a rotund figure. Right at this moment he was flanked by two Daleks and facing the black Dalek, wearing an air of impetuous defiance that seemed so-

"That's _you_, isn't it?!"

Hands still at his temple, eyes closed, the Doctor could only manage a nod.

The scene around them seemed to jerk into life, as if someone had just pressed the 'play' button.

"YOU WILL WIT-NESS THE SUP-REM-ACY OF THE DA-LEK RACE ONCE A-GAIN, DOC-TOR!"

The Doctor – not _her _Doctor, but still unmistakably him (it was something in the eyes) folded his arms and yawned theatrically, unimpressed. "For a supreme race you still seem awfully obsessed with gloating and showboating," he observed. "Not exactly _supreme _behaviour."

Despite everything, Rose found herself beginning to smile. Did he _ever _change all that much?

"YOU WILL BE LEFT A-LIVE TO TAKE THE MESS-AGE OF WHAT YOU SEE TO-DAY TO THE TIME LORDS! THE DA-LEKS ARE A-WARE OF THEIR ATT-EMPT TO EXT-ERM-IN-ATE US FROM TIME! WE CON-SIDER THIS AN ACT OF WAR!"

Now the other Doctor did look up. Something made Rose glance from him to her Doctor as the other spoke, and she felt a chill as she realised both Doctors were speaking in perfect unison, although only the past Doctor's voice was audible.

"War?" he said. "You would go to _war _with the Time Lords?" and he began to laugh. "You wouldn't stand a chance. What they asked me to do before – it was a secret operation. Low-key. We're not meant to 'interfere' with time," his derisive expression betrayed what he thought of that mantra, "but if you come after us...if you _dared_ to…" he smiled, smugly, in the kind of way she'd seen her own Doctor go after the Prime Minister with such righteous anger only recently, "you'll know what true power is."

The scene seemed to freeze again. Her own Doctor spoke now, his eyes still closed. It was his voice that resounded through the memory.

"I was wrong of course," he said, softly, regretfully. "I was so sure of my people's power that I was arrogant. I called the Daleks out. I mocked them. I beat them at every turn until they poured their anger at me against my whole planet, my people. Against the universe."

Ahead of them, through the viewing screen on the starship's bridge, the most beautiful planet Rose had ever seen hung in space. Though surrounded by enormous Dalek ships and what she guessed were smaller Therkan vessels – how many piloted, she wondered in a faintly ill way, by super-advanced toddlers? – the planet was magnificent. The oceans were a deeper shade than Earth's, the continents varying between a peerless pastel of greens, reds and here and there, faint spines of grey and white where mountain ranges soared upward.

"My home," Philip said in that childish voice of his. A little boy lost.

"It began here," the Doctor said, "it began with Therka."

Philip began to cry.

The scene resumed.

"WRONG A-GAIN, DOC-TOR!" the Black Dalek intoned in response. Though it was hard to read emotion into Dalek pronouncements – they seemed to veer from all-out fire-and-brimstone hatred and hellfire to merely insanely angry – the creature seemed particularly vehement. "IT IS YOU WHO WILL SEE TRUE PO-WER!"

After that, it scarcely seemed to matter what was said. Rose had vague recollections afterward of the Doctor and his future (echo-self?) pleading, cajoling, trying everything. Nothing worked, and when the Dalek fleet converged above the planet and began to pound it, everyone fell silent, save the faint sobbing of Philip in his life-support chair.

It was not immediate. It was not one huge laser blast that lanced the planet apart, scorched it like a tumour. That would have been clean and quick and not the Dalek way at all.

No, Therka was driven apart slowly. The seas boiled. The Daleks kept firing. Infernos raged on the landmasses, joined, became an almost-encompassing planetary blanket of flame. The Daleks kept firing. She could see the planet begin to shiver, the tectonic plates groaning under the strain. Worse, whether through accident or design there were some portions of the planet the Daleks left untouched. She could visualise being on one of those brief oases of life, watching and feeling your homeworld be pulverised around you, knowing you had no escape, no way out. Waiting for death from the skies, only to be swallowed by the ground below as the crust imploded.

Philip gave a rasping, drawn-out gasp, and the memory collapsed around them just as the planet had. They were back in the play house's penthouse suite, with a mountain of toys at their back and the huge television before them.

"Your homeworld was destroyed by monsters," the Doctor said gently. "You're _not_ one. Prove it."

Philip raised his head, and Rose knew things were going to be bad.

"_You_," he said, his eyes locked on the Doctor.

The Doctor seemed to register that he had made a misjudgement. The sureness drained from his face, and Rose saw genuine fear surface within him, something which scared her in turn.

"They destroyed my planet because of _you_. To send a message to _you_."

The Doctor staggered backwards, pale and shaking, his hands scrabbled to his chest. It wasn't fear, she realised, at least not entirely. It was pain. Philip's eyes were gleaming, glittering with tears and an inner power that was now crushing the life from the Doctor.

"Stop it! You're killing him!" Rose cried, trying to move forward. Trying to move. Failing. Miss Hoolie and PC Plum found themselves similarly immobile.

The Doctor was under no such limitations. He was free – free to fall to his knees, free to bleed from his ears, his nose, as his mind was squeezed in a psychic grip so strong that he should have been unconscious long since. He knew that part of that power coming his way was designed to keep him awake, allow him to fully experience the agony.

"I hate you," Philip said, "I hate you _hate you _hate _you _HATE YOU!!!"

The Doctor began to shriek, just as he had done in the nursery. Rose knew in her heart that this time there would be no awakening, no healing.

"I will have the childhood I should have had," he went on, "I will have laughter, and fun, and clip-clop puppets. And I will have…a Mummy and Daddy."

He turned to Miss Hoolie and PC Plum. _That's why they were kept alive_, Rose realised, seeing the implications sink in to both.

But to her disbelief, Miss Hoolie smiled. It was the first _real _smile Rose had seen her give, and it lit up her face. "Son," she choked in joy, in disbelief.

Rose's heart sank further. Philip's control had extended once again.

"Mummy," Philip replied gleefully.

"_She wasn't talking to you_."

Rose turned instinctively to face the new voice, only then realising that she had the power to move. On the giant video wall behind Philip, the individual portions of the screen that had previously shown scenes from around the island where changing.

Filling up with people.

One of them stood out immediately. He was a small boy of no more than four or five, but he had the look of his father about him. He was directly in the centre of the video wall, taking up a fair percentage of the space there. He glared down at Philip.

"Matty," Miss Hoolie choked. "Matty, oh God…where are you? Are you OK?"

"_I'm fine Mam_," Matty replied. His voice was sure, precise, not that of a four year old. "_Tyler is here with me_."

On cue, another portion of the video wall changed beside him, to show an adorable little toddler's face. "_MAMMY_!" he squawked in that toddler-squeal of delight. "_DA_!"

Tears streamed freely down Miss Hoolie's face. Freed too of her paralysis, she and PC Plum rushed forward as Rose moved back, and at the same time she reached the Doctor, they reached Philip in his chair. There was murderous intent in PC Plum's eyes.

"_Don't, Da_," Matty said. It was enough to stay his hand.

"Go away!" Philip screamed up at the faces, more and more of which were filling up every available square of space. "Go away, all of you! You don't _belong_!"

"_He got rid of us all,_" an man in his mid-thirties spoke. "_We're the forgotten. The ones who didn't fit with his little paradise._"

"Johnny?" PC Plum said, astonished.

"_Is my Suzy there_?" a much older man demanded to know. He peered down at them short-sightedly from his pixellated prison. "_Is she alright, my Suzy? Tell her I'm coming back! Did she marry someone else? Did she wait? She'd better have!_"

"Jim McCormack, I don't believe it," PC Plum said.

It was Matty's turn to speak again. His eyes remained fixed on the figure in the life-support chair. "_It's over. Let us go and leave this place, this planet, and die in peace._"

"No!" Philip screamed back. "No, no I won't! You can't _make _me!" they could see him straining, trying to re-assert the psychic and telekinetic control he had enjoyed only moments before, but to no avail. All of the faces stared at him, accusing, demanding. "I'm _older _than you!" he screamed.

The slap rang out long and loud.

Miss Hoolie withdrew her hand. There was utter silence. A red handprint was fresh on Philip's left cheek. His fingers slowly came up to touch the skin, his eyes wide and disbelieving.

"That is _enough_," she said.

"You-"

"Listen to me," she cut him off. "I worked with children every day. I had two of my own. And despite what they told you and what they did to you, they might have made you able to fly starships and whatever but they did _not _age you, because you behave like every child I've ever seen who didn't get his own way. You rage and you scream and you cry. There's nothing like a child's anger, believe you me. _Nothing_ comes close to that level of pure rage. You just happen to be a child with the power behind you to make people suffer for the times you're in a tantrum. So let me tell you this, Philip – you didn't miss your childhood. You're still _living _it, because you're _still _a child. You never stopped being one. And let me tell you something else as well – _none_ of us do. Not until we decide that we're ready. And sooner or later you have to be – you can't stay forever in childhood. You've got to move on, got to use it to decide what kind of adult you're going to be. Otherwise, what's the _point_?"

"_I missed you, Mam_," Matty said softly.

She spared a second to smile up at her son before returning to her task. "Do you know what happens to little boys who always get what they want? They never grow up. If we never learn how to deal with disappointment, with sadness, if we're never told _why _we can't always eat sweeties, then do you know what we become?"

"What?" Philip asked.

"Daleks," the Doctor answered.

Philip flinched as if physically struck.

"I don't want to be a Dalek," he said. "I want to be a good boy."

And just like that, the play house began to fold up on itself, a card house collapsing from the top down, the walls and the floors and the televisions and toys becoming two-dimensional, vanishing into the space between.

Within moments they stood in that field in which it had all began, the four of them and Philip.

And the others.

"Matty! Tyler!" PC Plum and Miss Hoolie cried simultaneously.

"Mam! Dad!" the boys replied, equally in harmony. Rose felt tears sting her eyes as she watched the four of them come together so quickly and forcefully she half-expected to hear an audible _thump_. PC Plum picked up Matty and his wife scooped up little Tyler and they spun and hugged and both boys were kissed over and over again, for reassurance and love and to double-check that this moment was actually real.

"Well now," another voice sounded from her right, "that was rather exciting all in all, eh?"

She turned. "_Archie_!" she squealed with delight and ran to embrace the man who had shot the Doctor not two hours and a lifetime ago.

"Hey, I'm alive too," Spencer noted as they hugged. "Ah, whatever…"

Edie was hunting through the crowd. She couldn't see…where was-

"Still my gorgeous?"

Her heart skipped. She turned, and there she was. "Alison," she managed, before they were together. It was only when she'd emerged from the kiss, performed right in front of a good percentage of the former population of Balamory town, that she realised something.

"Oh," she said, "I was in the closet, wasn't I?"

"_Was_ is right," growled Jim McCormack ominously, and there was a moment's tension before he cracked a huge _gotcha _grin. "Holy Jesus Edie, _everyone_ knew! You're not the only gay in the vill-age you know!"

"Got something to tell us, Jim?" PC Plum called, to general uproar.

"Aye – I've been without my good lady wife for God knows how long, so let me tell ye right now – the shop'll be closed for at _least_ tomorrow!"

"Er, about your shop, Jim-" Archie began, looking suddenly extremely guilty.

In the face of the outpouring of emotion around her, which had more to do with shock and relief at being alive, being free as it did with anything else, Rose looked for the Doctor. She found him a little way away, with Philip beside him. The boy-

"He's dying," the Doctor said simply. "I thought someone should be with him."

She placed a hand on his shoulder, could feel his gratitude radiating up to her, and it was enough.

A little way away, Miss Hoolie saw.

Philip's chest rose and fell shallowly, irregularly now. "Can't we bring him somewhere? Get him help?" Rose said, gesturing to the TARDIS.

The Doctor shook his head. "It's a miracle he's lived this long," he replied simply.

"Thank you," Philip gasped up at them.

"You're welcome," Rose said automatically, though she was at a loss as to what for.

"He wasn't talking to you."

It was Miss Hoolie – no, scratch that. It was Kerrie. She had not said that last unkindly, but she had it firmly nonetheless. She knelt down between them to better speak to Philip in the life-support chair.

One by one, the people of Balamory fell silent as they watched Kerrie speak to the alien that had stolen their lives, stolen their lovers and children and homes and their very selves. They watched her speak softly, and slowly.

They watched her lean forward and kiss him, once, on the cheek.

They watched him smile.

And they watched as his chest stopped its gentle rise and fall.

Kerrie rose after a while, and bade her family to come to her, and they did and she embraced them.

"Let's go home," she said.

**36**

"I'm telling you, Mr Connors."

Mr Connors scowled down the phone, for all the good it did him. He was the sort of man to scowl down phone lines, though. Whatever joker this was, he had about five seconds more of being employed by Ordnance Survey.

"You're telling me," he said, "that an entire _island _– fully populated, naturally – off the coast of Scotland has just _appeared_ during your survey."

"No, sir. Not appeared. _Reappeared_."

"Ah," Mr Connors said, as if this made everything clear. "Of course! Because those sort of things happen all the time! What's tomorrow? Brigadoon turns up, opens strip club? Motto: _not just her clothes that'll vanish!_"

He put the phone down. Magic islands. Magic mushrooms more like it...

It was only the beginning.

**37**

Balamory was, as Rose had already seen once before, well able to party when the mood took it. Thankfully on this occasion the festivities remained within the realm of a PG certificate - possibly because the children were back, possibly because now the "spell" (the word had stuck, despite the Doctor's protests) had been lifted from the island, people came to the conclusion _en masse _that what happened during down times was perhaps best kept in the past. Securely locked away. Forever. And ever.

It was a wonderful place. Rose had never been among happier, more grateful people. Parents had been reunited with children, husbands with wives, siblings embraced for the first time in years. The forgotten people had returned, and no-one would ever be forced to make mountains out of yoghurt pots ever again. Everyone could go back to being miserable about lack of money, rubbish weather and the price of a pint; but nowhere on Earth right at this moment would you find people doing it with bigger smiles on their faces.

Rose and the Doctor sat with Archie on a small stone wall outside the Balamory pub, The Covenanters (until fairly recently, the Balamory Lego Museum). It was packed to the rafters inside, children and all.

"A lot of them will go, of course," Archie said. "For now I think everyone is enjoying the freedom and the reunion and all that, but..." he looked out across the bay, "...too much has happened. There'll be a ferry along before long I should think, now we're back in the world again. I expect quite a few will leave the island and not come back."

"What about you?" Rose asked him.

"Me?" he looked at her, as if surprised she would ask. "Oh no, I'll stay. This is my home. Besides," and he grinned affably, "I _am_ a man of science. I can't let something like this happen under my nose and just up sticks and leave now, can I."

The Doctor made no comment. He was looking down the hill toward the bay, but not at the water itself. In a small field at the entrance of town, a tiny graveyard lay.

One of the graves freshly dug.

"Make sure..." the Doctor said, and then trailed off. He tried again. "Make sure that no-one..."

Archie nodded. "No-one will," he promised. "And if they do, they'll have PC Plum and myself to answer to. It'll be well tended and well kept, as long as I'm here."

The door to the pub opened. Suzy and her Jim - well, the most appropriate word would have been _staggered _from the interior, but a kinder person might simply settle for _emerged_.

"Doctor! Rose! Archie!" Suzy called, extremely unsteadily merrily. "Happy Hogmanay!"

"It's August 3rd Suzy," Archie replied mildly, "we checked with the mainland earlier, remember?"

"All I know is we've missed at _least _three Hogmanays!" Jim cackled, making to lean on the wall. Only the Doctor's lightning reflexes prevented him from going over. "Time to start catchin' up, eh!"

"So long as you have my _New Scientist_ in the shop - I've missed at least thirty back issues," Archie said, mock-sternly. He had been, to put it rather mildly, pleased to discover upon everyone's return to town that the shop was back and _not_ a smoking ruin caused by an awry rocket.

Suzy waved an airy hand as they walked away. "You'll have to talk to our Penny," she called back, "she's running the shop. As of today! She's gonna organise ya all right!" and she dissolved into laughter, leaning on her husband's shoulder for support.

They watched as they wound a meandering path down the hill.

"Back to reality," Archie said. "Such as it is."

"One thing I want to know," Rose piped up. She simply couldn't wait any longer for this. It had been eating at her for hours.

"Yes?" the Doctor and Archie both answered. A look was exchanged between them.

"Why did his power fade? At the end, when everyone appeared on the video screen...he tried to control everyone, and he couldn't. Why not?"

"He was trying to control the TARDIS," the Doctor answered. "But he thought it was a machine. It's not. It's a sentient being, and it has more power than he could have ever hoped to control. Some small fraction of that power went into allowing the people he'd trapped to manifest themselves. He could have still destroyed them, though. Kerrie saved us with that little speech she made."

"So the TARDIS and Kerrie saved us at the end.." Rose said thoughtfully, before turning to Archie, "and it was _your _yoghurt-pot force-field deactivator that let us get in there to face him in the first place."

"Yes, I suppose it was," Archie said. He'd caught the telltale wink she threw at him.

Rose turned back to the Doctor. "So what, exactly, did _you_ do?"

"What?!" he spluttered.

"Well, apart from get shot," she conceded.

"Saving your life!" the Doctor returned, indignant in the extreme.

"And almost get your brain burned out through psychic manipulation," Archie added. He paused for maximum effect. "Twice."

"_Et tu_, _puree_?! I don't have to stand for this...!"

The ebb and flow of their bickering voices carried gently on the twilight breeze, over the coloured houses of the town (some soon to be whitewashed, some not), over the happy couple of Suzy and her Jim, over the harbour, open for business, open to the world. Some small part of it carried to the cemetery by the coast road.

All was still there.

At last, all was peaceful.

**38**

"This looks like your stop," Edie said, as the bus bumped gently to a halt beside a familar police box.

They dismounted. So did Edie, and practically everyone else who could find the space to squeeze in. Quite a few were nursing heads. It had been a hell of a night at The Covenanters.

PC Plum stepped forward first. He was doing a lot of that, it seemed.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for everything."

"A pleasure," the Doctor beamed in response, pumping his hand.

"If you ever find yourself in Scotland again," Suzy proclaimed, after hugging them both fiercely, "you just tell people, you're from Balamory. This is your home away from home now, d'you hear?"

Rose smiled and nodded. "I'd like that," she said, and was amazed to find that she was telling the truth. In less than a day on Balamory she'd been shot at, chased by a bus full of insane mind-controlled child-zombies wielding RPGs and almost swallowed by oblivion in a ten-storey Wendy House.

She had a brief flash of razor-bladed Christmas trees and killer mannequins.

_My God_, she thought. _It really IS a home away from home_.

"What will you do now?" the Doctor asked.

The townspeople looked at each other. Something was brewing.

"We're going to Vegas!" Spencer whooped.

"What, _all_ of ya? How can you afford that?" Rose asked.

More looks amongst each other.

"Fundraising," Kerrie Hoolie said.

**39**

"Er, Mr Jameson?"

Mr Jameson looked up from his newspaper at the nervous assistant at his door. "Yes?" he said with a politeness he didn't necessarily feel. He hated interruptions at lunch.

"I have someone on the line, sir...ah..."

"Yes...?" he said again, this time with the undercurrent of impatiencemore evident.

The assistant seemed to shrug as if to say _what the hell_. "She's wondering if the BBC would be interested in purchasing ready-made locally-produced childrens television. Apparently the...the ah, island she lives on has been filming it as a sort of...project."

Mr Jameson frowned. "Ready-made?" he repeated doubtfully, taking a sip of his coffee. "How much of it is there?"

Again, that _what the hell_ shrug. "Over three hundred episodes."

"_What_?"

**40**

"You're sure?" the Doctor asked again.

Archie took one last long look around the TARDIS' interior. He was on the verge of tears. "I can't," he said, in a small little-boy voice, as if unable to grasp what he was saying, "I just...not now. But..." and he grabbed the Doctor's jacket by the arm, "one day, you'll look back in on me. Promise?"

"Count on it," the Doctor promised.

Moments later, with Archie's fingernails practically leaving grooves in the TARDIS door, the last of the _goodbyes _from the assembled crowd outside shut off abruptly as the Doctor closed the doors.

He looked at Rose. They breathed out as one, long and luxuriously. Rose didn't know whether to burst out laughing or into tears. She settled for neither.

"Ever think what our lives would be like if someone made a childrens TV show out of us?" she asked him.

"Oh, I'd imagine we'd have farting aliens…"

"…yeah, and be chased down corridors by monsters like in _Scooby Doo_," she chuckled.

"Off we go?" he said.

"Just _one_ thing," she replied.

"Yes?"

"Back when I had the heart of the TARDIS within me...when I used it to destroy the Daleks. I don't remember everything about that, but one thing I said sticks with me."

He was way ahead of her. "The Time War Ends," he said, unable to meet her eyes.

"But I was wrong, wasn't I? It's not over. There are going to be others like Philip, like you, out there. Maybe other Daleks too."

"I don't know, Rose."

"Don't you?"

He didn't answer.

Seconds later the TARDIS vanished from Balamory and from Earth, leaving behind all except that question, which hung in the air, a smile on a Cheshire Cat.

THE END


End file.
